Rams Strive to Be a Part of History in the Making

Game time for Everett and Germany approaches, only hours away now. Soon, the Rams and the Kansas City Chiefs will run through the tunnel at Olympiastadion, hoping for the best, hoping that nothing gets lost in the translation.

Twenty-seven years ago, President John F. Kennedy hoped for the same thing. Twenty-seven years ago, Kennedy stood on the balcony outside Berlin’s city hall and boldly uttered the immortal words “Ich bin ein Berliner” --a phrase that can be translated two ways:

I am a Berliner.

Or . . .

I am a jam doughnut.

Fortunately, Kennedy had a good crowd that day. His speech became quoted by historians, not west-end comedians, and the Berliners who aren’t glazed wound up naming a street after him.

Will the NFL be so lucky?

The city the Rams and the Chiefs will try to win over today is a polarized mix of very old and very young non-football fans. The West is rich and sophisticated, heavy in students and artists and futbol connoisseurs still reveling in West Germany’s World Cup triumph. In other words, a tough sell. The East, imprisoned behind the wall for so many years, is starved for any glimpse of Western culture, especially American sports--but it has no money to spend.

Nine months after the toppling of the Berlin Wall, this remains a city divided. To drive from West to East is to experience culture shock. Sleek high-tech towers suddenly give way to drab blocks of concrete. Mercedes and Jaguars are replaced on the streets by motorized little boxes called Trabants, the ugliest mode of modern transportation since the Pacer. Distinctly Germanic churches and Kaffeehausen fade into old Russian dome-tops and turrets.

A local saying goes: “You can remove the wall but you cannot remove the buildings.”

Not immediately, at least.

Scaffolds, bulldozers and cement mixers dominate the scenery in East Berlin. This is a city desperately trying to play catch-up. It needs new housing, new business centers, new stores.

Especially new stores. A too-common sight in West Berlin is a corner grocery with an overflow crowd extending out to the sidewalk and halfway down the block. These are East Berliners--and they aren’t waiting for lotto tickets.

“People complain they can’t find anything in the East,” says Peter Harnisch, a police lieutenant serving as the Rams’ escort in Berlin. “I recently went on a cycling trip to the other side and took in some of the stores. You would see one bar of chocolate, a mess of milk bottles all over the place, no decorations. They have to go to the West for their shopping, even for just some bread or something.”

Harnisch worked the Berlin Wall last Nov. 9, the day the reunification of Berlin began with the opening of Potsdamer Platz. “If you look at the picture in National Geographic,” Harnisch points out, “that little finger spot is me.”

He remembers first hearing the news while watching television during a 24-hour guard shift. “They said there was a press conference in the East and that people can now travel from East to West with just a stamp on their passport,” Harnisch said. “The moment I got to my checkpoint, you could see the Trabants coming, by the hundreds. One moment the streets are empty. Then, suddenly, they came.”

Christmas arrived early in Berlin. As the Easterners crossed to the other side, Harnisch said, flowers provided by a Dutch florist were handed out as gifts. So were bowls of soup. “The police were in the street, feeding them with soup, because they had no money for food,” Harnisch says.

A heady 24 hours.

“I have been part of history in this moment,” Harnisch says proudly. “It was great.”

Ever since, Berlin has been a city of haves and hope-to-haves. Making up for lost time has become a way of life.

“It’s fascinating to watch,” says Andrew Guiness, publisher of The Berliner, an English language magazine printed here. “The young people in the East are obsessed with American culture. They live vicariously through it.”

Interest in American movies is so great that some are shown, drive-in style, at outdoor amphitheaters. “The Blues Brothers” and “Dirty Dancing” drew crowds of 20,000. A European version of MTV, splicing videos of local bands between those by Madonna and Prince, is a smash hit. One late-night TV program features German kids lip-syncing and playing air guitar to songs by American hard-rock groups.

Von Jovi.

The NFL sees this and hopes to tap in too. It probably won’t happen today--a half-empty Olympiastadion is a possibility the league concedes--but the NFL isn’t giving up on tomorrow.

“Physically, Berlin is as large as London or Paris,” Guiness notes. “Now that the city has opened up, you’re going to see interest in American sports mushroom very quickly. Germans are similar to Italians that way--they’re sports crazy.”

Still, the German diet is set in its ways. Raspberry syrup is squirted into tankards of beer. Strudel is served with vanilla sauce. And football, real football, is played in short pants and not helmets.

It’s going to take time to change that menu. The Rams and the Chiefs know this, but they’re out there trying, anyway.

Around the city, the word has gone out: Don’t eat the Berliners.

Today, the NFL needs all the potential fans it can get.