Last July, the German weekly Der Spiegel printed a cover bearing the headline “Wir sind wieder . . . wer?” This headline was a play on words based on a saying that became popular about 10 years after the end of the second World War. “Wir sind wieder wer” means “we’re somebody again,” and Spiegel’s tweak was asking, literally: “we are again . . . who?”

The title article was a rumination on what the national team’s victory in the World Cup said about Germany in 2014. But the headline was a reminder that nothing the German team ever does can equal the impact of its first and greatest World Cup win, when they went as underdogs to the 1954 final in Bern and beat Hungary – then considered the team of the century – by three goals to two. Football is never truly important, but the Miracle of Bern is probably as close as it gets.

West Germany had been outsiders in every sense. In their second group match they had been thrashed 8-3 by Hungary. “Nobody believed in us. We were at rock bottom, politically, economically and in terms of sport,” the midfielder Horst Eckel told Stern on the 50th anniversary of the match.

Undaunted, the West Germans beat Turkey, Yugoslavia and Austria to earn a rematch against the Hungarians in the final. After eight minutes, Hungary led 2-0. Ten minutes later West Germany had fought back to 2-2. With six minutes remaining, the ball broke to Helmut Rahn on the edge of the box and his left-footed shot flew past the Hungarian goalkeeper, Gyula Grocsis, into the bottom corner.

Most Germans experienced the moment via the medium of Herbert Zimmermann’s radio commentary. His ragged screeches were to become one of the most famous broadcasts in German history. “Tor! Tor! Tor! Tor! Tor für Deutschland! Drei zu zwei führt Deutschland. Halten Sie mich für verrückt, halten Sie mich für übergeschnappt!” (“Goal, goal, goal, goal! Goal for Germany! Germany leads 3-2! Call me mad, call me crazy!”)

Zimmermann’s reaction at the final whistle also became immortal: “Aus, aus, aus, aus! Der Spiel ist aus! Deutschland ist Weltmeister!” (“Over, over, over, over! The game is over! Germany is world champion!”)

You notice that Zimmermann is calling the team Germany, not West Germany, which was a concept Germans were just getting used to. The Federal Republic was then only five years old and nobody could be sure it would be there much longer. Neither of the two previous German states had lasted as long as 15 years.

The ultimate success of the West German state obviously owed more to the Marshall Plan than to Rahn’s winner in Bern, but the impact of winning the World Cup on the national mood was profound. It was, as the Franco-German politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit would later point out, “the first time the Germans were recognised in the world for a non-aggressive achievement”.

Founding fathers

As spontaneous mass celebrations swept occupied Germany and jubilant crowds greeted the returning players, foreigners watched with a mixture of irritation and unease. Did this eruption of long-suppressed emotions herald the reawakening of aggressive German nationalism? It had not escaped the notice of the watching world that when the German anthem was played in the stadium in Bern to honour the victory, the German crowd sang along using the taboo words of the first verse, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles”, rather than the officially sanctioned third verse.

Two days later, the president of the German FA, Peco Bauwens, gave a speech to a victory gathering in a Munich beer hall. Nobody knows how many beers Bauwens had before he spoke. And it’s hard to say how much of the speech went out live on Bavarian radio before the signal was cut, because the tapes have been lost. But the next day’s newspapers reported that, after some remarks about how Germans must no longer tolerate being told they could not honour their flag as other nations did, Bauwens criticised the envious Romance nations; invoked Wotan, ruler of the Norse gods; and suggested that Herberger’s team was a fine example of the potential of the Führer principle in action.

Bauwens’s gaffe was good news at least for an East German establishment that had until then been at a loss to know what to say about a capitalist triumph they had never seen coming. The official stance in East Berlin was to favour their fellow communists from Hungary, but naturally that position was at odds with what was felt by pretty much the entire population. The East German administration felt more comfortable after Bauwens’s exuberance had exposed western crypto-fascism.

If the German success seemed to announce the rise of the Federal Republic, the Hungarian defeat was a portent of the disasters to come in that country. The striker Ferenc Puskas said that when he returned to Budapest, people looked at him as though he had a disease. The goalkeeper Grocsis was considered to have been at fault for Rahn’s goal. He remembered that the team was met by party general secretary Mátyás Rákosi, who assured them that “none of you should feel afraid of being punished for this game”.

Grocsis suspected otherwise. After an abortive attempt to defect during the Hungarian revolution in 1956, he was forced to sign for the tiny Tatabánya club and remain there in ignominy for the rest of his career.

Schmaltzy drama

Das Wunder von BernThe Miracle of Bern

In the half-century between the Miracle and the movie, certain allegations had been thrown around. The Hungarians always believed that the West Germans had targeted Puskas with heavy fouls in the first match between the sides, deliberately injuring his ankle so as to impair his effectiveness in a potential final. There had also been persistent rumours that the West Germans had been injected with stimulants in the dressing room before the final. While it seems they were injected with something – and with a dirty needle to boot, because several of them developed hepatitis after the tournament – there is no hard evidence to suggest the injections contained anything stronger than vitamin C.

The movie ignores all that, preferring to focus on the gnomic sayings of Herberger, the innovative studs provided to the German team by Adidas and the inspirational effect that looking into the crowd and seeing his kid friend’s face has on Helmut Rahn immediately before he scores the winning goal. Das Wunder von Bern shows us the version of 1954 that has been enshrined in German national myth.

An earlier German movie casts the Miracle in a subtly different light. The director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was part of the generation that was born immediately after the war. By the 1960s they were questioning whether their parents and grandparents truly had come to terms with the recent past, or whether they had simply forgotten it for the sake of convenience. Had the Federal Republic not simply rechannelled the nationalistic energy of the old Germany towards economic goals? If the slogan of 1954 was “we’re somebody again”, Fassbinder wondered who, exactly, “we” were supposed to be.

His 1978 film The Marriage of Maria Braun allegorises the early years of the West German state in the story of Maria, who begins the movie as one of the millions of Trümmerfrauen – rubble women – who led the reconstruction of a society that had lost so many of its young men. Several key scenes are played out to the sound of historic radio broadcasts. We hear Konrad Adenauer promising that he will not rearm West Germany and, later, announcing rearmament. The beautiful, ambitious Maria is not taking much notice. She is a cool materialist who says things like “books burn too fast, and they don’t give any heat”, and she’s preoccupied with getting ahead. She manipulates a succession of men and becomes rich, cynical and rather cruel: “It’s a bad time for feelings, I believe, but that suits me. It means nothing really affects me.”

Difficult to hear

Aus! Aus! Der Spiel ist aus!

The movie had begun with a portrait of Hitler on screen, now it ends with portraits of West German chancellors: Adenauer, Erhard, Kiesinger, Schmidt. Things might have changed, but not as much as you think.