Keeping their eyes on the ball

Three-hour documentary on pig farming in Moldavia? Video diary of a teenage narcissist in Los Angeles? Two hours of sentimental drama about the German football team's 1954 World Cup victory? I will do anything - and I mean anything - to avoid seeing Spider-Man 2.

Which brings me to The Miracle of Bern. In Germany, this film broke box-office records and reduced that old ham Gerhard Schrˆder to tears (you might say it brought out the wurst in the Chancellor). It has been seen as a part of that long process of greater glasnost and national self-examination which began in the 1980s and was provoked - at least in part - by the television screening of Holocaust.

Elsewhere, this US mini-series was viewed as a lite depiction of genocide, but in Germany it was a revelation, significantly undermining the "I was only following orders" defence which prevented the older generations from confronting their sins.

I say "significantly", rather than completely, because German collective denial has an uncomfortable resilience. If Germans wish to examine their national culpability for Nazism they can read Gita Sereny's Into That Darkness, Primo Levi's If This Is a Man or even Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners.

If, on the other hand, they wish to analyse their own tortured psyche, they can watch Volker Schlˆndorff 's exquisite film version of G¸nter Grass's novel The Tin Drum or Fassbinder's excoriating The Marriage of Maria Braun.

On television alone there have been two epic series: Berlin Alexanderplatz and Heimat, which looked at 20th-century German history with an evolved and forensic eye.

Far from being short on dramas which use the fate of individuals as a lens through which recent historical events can be evaluated, Germany has a large surplus. So, where does The Miracle of Bern fit in?

The answer is that it is part of the treacle lake rather than the unassailable mountain of truth. It's a trite, Oprah Winfrey-ised view of the German post-war experience, in which nationalism is resurrected under the banner of sporting success, and father-son bonding resolves all the traumas of the war.

It is 1954, and Matthias Lubanski (Louis Klamroth) is a 13-year-old boy crazy about football. He lives in the industrial Ruhr region, and idolises local player Helmut Rahn, aka The Boss (Sascha Gopel), for whom he is the bag carrier and lucky mascot.

Matthias's older brother, Bruno (Mirko Lang), is a musician with communist sympathies; his sister, Ingrid (Birthe Wolter), works in the café-bar that their mother, Christa (Johanna Gastdorf), has bought, and now runs to support her family, because her husband, Richard (Peter Lohmeyer), has been a prisoner of war in Russia for the past 11 years.