Chanterelles in the woods (Flickr: EdWohlfahrt)

One of the most challenging things about writing is trying to sum up entire places and periods in a few words so that you’re able to move on with your story. Yet if I were ever to need, for some reason or other, to briefly describe Germany in mid-September, I know exactly how I’d do it: chanterelles and plums.

That sounds better in German, since chanterelles are called Pfifferlinge and plums Pflaumen, which would give any such description a poetic alliteration of the first order. Yet apart from the usual writer’s aesthetic considerations, why consider these two particular foodstuffs?

Millions against mini-budget, record-holders against relegation candidates, favourites vs. underdogs: the contrasts s loaded up onto the game at the top of the league could not have been greater. Bayern München, a financially high-powered team who are favourites to take the title played against Mainz 05, genuine underdogs who have surprised everyone by going to the top of the table this season – and staying there.

Matthäus has been caught with another partner! What? Who? A Bulgarian! No? Oh right, you mean the Bulgarian national football team! That’s right: not many of you young ‘uns know this, but once, a long, long time ago Lothar Matthäus used to actually play world-class football. Then he joined other famous German sportsmen – like Boris Becker – in the gutter press with an unending string of cheap girls and even cheaper stories.

That’s why Matthäus never achieved his dream of managing Bayern München. After all, what Bundesliga team wants their coach’s sex-life splattered all over the pages of Germany’s notorious tabloid, Die Bild-Zeitung? And that’s why Matthäus’ only chance is in countries where people don’t read it: Serbia, Brasil, Israel, Hungary, and now Bulgaria.

It was the fourth match-day, and in this year’s Bundesliga, that could only mean one thing: derby time! In Wolfsburg, Gelsenkirchen and Hamburg too, neighbouring clubs lined up against each other, and it is this last local clash that really stood out. After all, it had been 48 years since the city rivals HSV and St. Pauli had met on the latter’s home turf at Millerntor. Up until this point, all meetings between the two teams had always ended up being relocated to HSV’s far bigger stadium at Volkspark.

Dortmund Hauptbahnhof, a typical German main station (Flickr: das_kine)

One of the first words that British schoolchildren who take German learn is Bahnhof, and very soon after, they are told about the prefix Haupt-: and, badda-bing, badda-bahnhof, you’ve got one of the most important words in the German language, a kind of key to the German soul.

What? A word which, translated, means “main station” – and this is supposed to open the treasure chest of the German psyche? Yes, you got it! Just give me a few minutes, and I’ll show you how.

Last week must have been difficult for all of you Bundesliga junkies: the season had just got going, and suddenly there was a pause for international games; and they weren’t even high-adrenaline games, either. We were forced into watching teams like Denmark, Belgium and Azerbaijan. That’s all over now, though: play started again on the weekend – and if you’re anything like me, you couldn’t wait!

Down, down, down, into the Berliner Unterwelt! Photo (cc) flickr user escpeapalumni

The meeting place was normal enough; if I hadn’t known what was going on beneath us and where we would spend the next hour and a half, I never would have guessed at what was just below the ground on which I stood.  Berlin’s Gesundbrunnen metro stop, both inside and outside, lacked the kind of dank, enthralling mystery that was waiting several stories beneath us in the Berliner Unterwelten.