One of the great values of international sport is that it brings people together, albeit in a competitive way. However, when Argentina recently cancelled a game they had scheduled in Israel we were reminded that sport is not really above politics but is merely allowed brief glimpses of an unrealistic utopia.
Germany are winners when it comes to the World Cup. But the country faces battles and has worked very hard to redress its 20th century story, a story which put paid to many sporting events. There was no World Cup tournament in 1942 or 1946.
One, I think, very moving and impressive feature of Germany are Stolpersteine.
In the pavements of several German cities, towns and villages you may find them - in English literally stumbling blocks. Stolpersteine are embedded stones with a small plaque on top. On the plaque is the name of someone who lived in a building nearby and who was taken away by the Nazis in or before World War II, never to return. Gunter Demnig, an artist from Cologne, made it something of a life's work to place these wherever research shows people were deported.
I photographed those below in an anonymous inner city street in Frankfurt am Main. Seven people whose 'crime' was to be Jewish.
Germany are winners when it comes to the World Cup. But the country faces battles and has worked very hard to redress its 20th century story, a story which put paid to many sporting events. There was no World Cup tournament in 1942 or 1946.
One, I think, very moving and impressive feature of Germany are Stolpersteine.
In the pavements of several German cities, towns and villages you may find them - in English literally stumbling blocks. Stolpersteine are embedded stones with a small plaque on top. On the plaque is the name of someone who lived in a building nearby and who was taken away by the Nazis in or before World War II, never to return. Gunter Demnig, an artist from Cologne, made it something of a life's work to place these wherever research shows people were deported. I photographed those below in an anonymous inner city street in Frankfurt am Main. Seven people whose 'crime' was to be Jewish.
Such is the irrational injustice of anti-Semitism that if I had stood in that street in the war as a Briton - the declared enemy - though I may well have been killed as a spy, I might have talked my way into a prisoner of war camp.
But had I been a Jew, and that was my home city, perhaps the very street I grew up on, I would more certainly have been killed and my family with me. We must never let the warm waves of sporting internationalism fool us into thinking that injustice can be eradicated by donning football shirts and kicking a ball. It might help. But justice costs more than that.
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