The Sunday on which I became world champion
The Sunday on which I became world champion is a story by Friedrich Christian Delius .
The autobiographical story was published in 1994 and has been translated into English, French, Danish, Italian, Dutch and Swedish. There are two audio books, one was read by Jürgen Uter and the other by Peter Lohmeyer .
action
The plot encompasses the experiences of an 11-year-old boy in the Hessian village of Wehrda on July 4, 1954, the day Germany won the World Cup .
The story is written from the boy's perspective. He grew up in a Christian household. His father is a pastor.
At the beginning of the plot, the boy is woken by the church bells at seven o'clock. Now he goes through a typical Sunday routine. Breakfast, attendance at church services, lunch and afternoon nap are described in detail. Thoughts of the boy are built into it, whereby the reader learns that he is stuttering, has psoriasis and cannot see blood. He seems to be suffering from the authoritarian parenting style that was common at the time. It also becomes clear that he is sometimes critical of Protestant rituals and content.
Throughout the whole story, the boy is looking forward to the upcoming radio broadcast of the final between Hungary and Germany. In the last third of the book Delius describes the radio transmission and how the boy feels it alone in the study. The boy notices the religious vocabulary of the radio commentator Herbert Zimmermann , which sometimes even scares him. For example, the boy asks himself whether he is violating the first of the Ten Commandments by listening to the football report, after the reporter called the goalkeeper Toni Turek "the god of football " . The boy perceives the radio report as an “unheard of worship service”.
By listening to football, the boy gains new self-confidence and manages to escape from the “father's cage”. An indication of this is the fact that he will stop stuttering.
The book ends with the boy meeting his friends outside in the church square shortly after the victory. He describes himself as "the happiest of all, happier perhaps than Werner Liebrich or Fritz Walter ".
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Sunday on which I became world champion on fcdelius.de