Barbara Geier: The Tuchel effect

TEXT & PHOTOS: BARBARA GEIER

By the time you read this, the football gods will have decided who’s going to lift the World Cup trophy. And who knows, maybe it will even have come home. My deadline for this column happens to have been 6 July and, in case you need reminding, the very early hours of that day were when England did “it” in the Azteca stadium. Hence, football coming home is more than ever in the air.

But how am I going to give this whole thing a German twist now, for the purposes of this column? The German team’s US appearance was a “disaster” – in the words of the German 1990 World Cup hero and former Germany manager, Jürgen Klinsmann, in an interview after. Not much writing material there. How lucky then that one German is, from my current 6 July perspective, still very much in the World Cup and happens to be the English manager. What a handy coincidence. I can use Thomas Tuchel as a hook for something that has long fascinated me as someone living with two languages in their head. That is, how we also become a different person when we speak a different language.

Although I can vouch for this personally (it’s true!), you don’t just have to take my word for it. There is scientific evidence for this phenomenon and studies show that multilingual people exhibit different personality profiles depending on the language in which they complete a personality questionnaire. In one study, for example, participants appeared more extroverted and neurotic when they completed the personality questionnaire in Spanish, whereas they tended to see themselves as more agreeable when the questionnaire was in German.

I was thinking about this in the Tuchel context and how the way he is perceived in the UK seems to be quite different to how he comes across in Germany. I always had him down as a very serious type, stern even, someone who always looks a bit ‘verbissen’ (great German word, literally doggedly in English). And I know a fair few Germans that are into football who aren’t particularly positive about him, summing up their sentiments in the not very helpful sentence “ah, no, don’t like him.” Now, in the whole World Cup context and after having seen interviews with him and the usual bits and pieces on social media, I realised that he comes across differently in English. More friendly, more open, even laughing sometimes, a good communicator, altogether more relaxed and looser.

It makes a lot of sense to me. Sometimes, when I step outside myself and look at me communicating in English, I’m amazed. Because what I’ve just said there in English, I wouldn’t have in German. I just wouldn’t say certain things in German, because they’d sound completely over the top and silly. While in English, with its very different vocab around emotions, I’m someone who loves all kinds of things that, in German, I would describe in altogether more restrained terms. I love (here we go!) having this linguistic gateway into an altered personality. Anyone feeling the same, let me know. And in the meantime, enjoy the summer – no matter if football made it home in the end or not!