--------------

I'm a European in a deeply Euroskeptic country. Specifically I am a Germanophile in a country still haunted by the ghosts of the two world wars. In fact, it is those ghosts which first brought me into its orbit.

The troops who remained after the end of the 1939-45 war had been strained through the blotting paper of geopolitics, and preventative measures designed to prevent a third war, into the ongoing presence as a NATO and EU partner. The residual presence of UK armed forces played host to a spiral arm of my family in the post-industrial greys of the Ruhrgebiet, as they played civilian civic roles within a couple of bases and we made sporadic childhood trips to the Ruhrgebiet like any family visiting far flung relatives.

Faced with a confusing familiarity on base, of British food and syndicated British broadcasting and yet commercial premises either controlled by the state or by benevolent non-profit partners, I relished the travelling to and from, with memories of Ausfahrt ramps and the rhythmic cadences of a language which sounded so gutteral and yet so nearly English. Even a disasterous trip through Duesseldorf Airport failed to cure me of my curiousity.

Teenage years were spent studying the death of the Weimar Republic (by most accounts, the most democratic state ever to have existed - eventually overthrown by the inherant instability in democracy) and the subsequent and consequent rise of extremism of both shades and the National Socialist Democratic Workers Party up to and then after the Second World War served up my first ever visit to Berlin, to the Topographie des Terror in the old headquarters of the Staatspolizei and to the slightly more Disneyland venue of Checkpoint Charlie.

At the time of the visit, Berlin was - to borrow from Dean Aitchison - a city without an empire and yet to have found a role. A later visit spent in slightly older company served only to reinforce a dislike of capital cities although I have to admit to a state of awe when wandering the amazing dome of the Reichstagsgebaeude.

After a gap of a few years, I returned to Germany in 2004 for the completing of a long path from Northern England's wooleybacks to North Germany's Nordlichtern.

I had graduated in the summer and took to the air, attempting to convert my basic high school German into a useable professional skill. I picked Bremen, a city which has grown up along the banks of the River Weser to the extent that it is known as 'the long village' by many. Bremen was comfortingly condensed in structure (in much the same way as Manchester city is to me) and usefully filled with a population happy to converse in their own tongue rather than default to English at the first opportunity. Even when their own tongue drifts into the dialect of Plattdeutsch, which is somewhere closer to English or Dutch.

Bremen is a two-city state, with the municipal centre tethered to the harbour of Bremerhafen. Between and around the two cities is Niedersachsen. Sprawling from the 'sea to the Harz mountains' as the local radio station FFN has it. The state capital is Hannover, world-renowned for its exhibitions and recognisable in the UK for its historical links to the royal family. Niedersachsen is not a densely populated state. Hannover's conurbation, such as it is, is closer to a drag net, pulling in Braunschweig, Göttingen and Wolfsburg.

Meisterstadt Wolfsburg

That second trip included Wolfsburg and the surrounding area, I had a tour of the extraordinary Autostadt theme park and took in a football game at the home of the 2009 German national football league champions.

What can you say about this town? Created by the Nazi Party as a worker town for the construction of an iconic vehicle, it remains indelibly linked to its dominant employer, Volkswagen, who's global headquarters is in the town.
But this industrial city of barely 100,000 people and a unitary government has given birth to a Championship-winning football club.

The stadium is Volkswagen Arena and the team is Verein für Leibesübungen
Wolfsburg-Fußball, or VfL Wolfsburg, and I was lucky enough to attend during the previous spell of table topping by the club.



There is a degree of cynicism about VfL Wolfsburg, a view that they are a 'plastic club' only in existance because of the largesse of sole-owner VW and that they 'have no history'. So now, they do. And I believe that criticism of artificial support is fundamentally flawed. VW did not arrive, buy a club and win the league, they have always been in town and involved with the club.

On my way into and out of the country, I made also made brief excursions to Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg and left the country feeling like my two month language course had been a peak experience, to use a Maslow-ism, revealing the deep ties between my spirit and the country, a feeling which has not left me in the three years since I left.

So this is to my spiritual twin Lilja, my good friend Jeannine and the many bemused Germans I have met along the way who have invariably told me that "alles in Ordnung", even if they begun by asking why I was bothering with their language - when I could already speak English.