Racist behaviour by soccer hooligans raises the spectre of images the country has spent years trying to erase

It's a simple gesture. You place your left forefinger under your nose, as if it were a small mustache, and you hold your right arm straight out at a 45-degree angle, your palm downward.

Among soccer fans, the Hitler salute is an enduringly popular flourish, guaranteed to raise the ire of the other side. Fans of England's national team love doing it en masse, with loud chants of "Sieg Heil," even if the opponent is, say, Ireland. If Germany is involved, they'll also sing Ten German Bombers (while swinging their outstretched arms in imitation of an RAF plane). If another European country is playing, they're likely to chant, "If it weren't for the English, you'd be Krauts."

Some German, Spanish and Italian fans, for their part, have their own favourite gesture: the monkey imitation. This is done whenever a black-skinned player appears, sometimes accompanied by bananas thrown onto the field and racial insults. A number of black players, led by Nigerian-born German striker Adebowale Ogungbure, have come up with an apt response: Give the fans a Hitler salute.

Here in Nuremberg, these things pose a few problems, to put it mildly.

As hosts of soccer's month-long World Cup, the most-watched sports event on the planet, Germans are preparing themselves for an enormous global party -- and also for a confrontation with nationalism, inter-ethnic violence and fascist symbolism on a scale they haven't seen in 60 years. This tournament is never simply about soccer. It is a collision of nations and competing ideas of nationalism, with all the joy and violence that implies -- the rooftop dancing and the racist chants, often both at once. The clashes are usually ritual, symbolic and warm-hearted, sometimes angry, occasionally deadly.

For Germans, none of it is innocent, and there is a palpable fear that their country will become the backdrop for the kinds of sights and messages they have spent two generations erasing.

To prevent this, Germany has developed a new science of crowd control -- in part by erasing national borders and allowing the police forces of other countries to operate here as if they were at home.

As one of the 12 host cities, and the one where some of the more controversial and politically loaded encounters will take place, Nuremberg has the most to fear.

"If you have a history like Nuremberg has -- it's more than a thousand years old, but it is only those 12 years between 1939 and 1945 that people think about, not just outside but also here," says Ulrich Maly, the city's youthful Social Democrat mayor. "It's normal to concentrate on these things, both for Nurembergers and for foreigners. We have some very large and famous structures that we can't simply ignore, we can't simply pretend those events didn't happen."

Those structures are a big problem. Nuremberg's 36,000-seat soccer stadium is dwarfed by the monstrosity beside it, a dozen times the length and breadth of a soccer field. Zeppelin Field, made to hold up to 200,000 people, was designed by Adolf Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, in the early 1930s to last 1,000 years, and its famous rallies are likely to remain in our collective memories for even longer: On the main podium, which still sits heavily at the end of the field, Hitler would stand surrounded by banners, flames and beaming searchlights, as he did in Triumph of the Will , and address his nation in furious speeches, including the 1935 address in which he stripped Jews of their property and basic human rights in the Nuremberg Laws.

The stadium is also dwarfed by another much larger stadium-like structure, Speer's Third Reich Congress Hall, modelled after the Roman Colosseum but more than twice the size. It was from this building, thankfully unfinished, that Hitler's National Socialist Party was going to rule the world.

Several weeks ago, Mr. Maly strolled through this complex with his police chief. They faced a problem known to every World Cup city: What to do with the huge number of international fans, sometimes as many as 100,000 at each game, who show up without a ticket? They will want to watch the game outside the stadium, and they could get rowdy.

"We talked about fencing it off, or using police to keep people away," Mr. Maly said in an interview at the 400-year-old City Hall in Nuremberg's historic centre. "Then I realized that we should do the complete opposite."

So giant TV screens will be set up in Hitler's Congress, and fans will be free to watch the game, drink all they want and confront one another in whatever manner they choose. Zeppelin Field will also be fully open. "We don't want to hide these things, but draw attention to them and make people aware," Mr. Maly said. "Maybe a few of them will visit the Documentation Centre next door and learn about what really took place here."

But that decision may have been made before the mayor realized exactly what would be taking place in Nuremberg.

Tomorrow will be a difficult test: Iran versus Mexico. Both countries are truly soccer-mad, but neither is likely to send many fans. The problem is with a different sort of hooligan -- the last sort any German wants to see.

There is a real possibility that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will show up to support his country's team. He is probably best known these days as the world's most prominent Holocaust denier. His frequent speeches, in which he argues, for example, that Jews are the source of the world's diseases or that Israel should be wiped off the map, are not the sort of thing that people in Nuremberg want to have associated with their city once again.

In response, protest marches have been organized by an Israeli group, by Amnesty International and by Iranian expatriates. "For me, this man is a second Hitler," said Charlotte Knobloch, the leader of Germany's small Jewish community. "He denies the Holocaust. That is illegal in Germany." Even if he doesn't show up, his vice-president is already in Germany.

Mr. Maly says he will take part in the Israeli march, along with his counterparts in the Green and Christian Democrat parties.

But this has raised an even more alarming possibility. German extreme-right party the NPD, whose roots can be traced back to Hitler's National Socialists and which has support in the outskirts of Nuremberg, has spoken in support of Mr. Ahmadinejad (presumably for his anti-Semitic views). While they certainly aren't a major force in German politics, they are known for their highly visible and well-organized marches -- and people in Nuremberg are terrified that real-life Nazis will make an appearance before the world's TV cameras.

If Nuremberg survives tomorrow without incident, it will still have to get through Thursday, when England plays Trinidad and Tobago. Here is the larger fear of many Germans: English violence plus Hitler-obsessed fans plus racial conflict. This, more than anything, is the subject of the German counterattack.

It isn't just Germans who are fearful of English obsessions. British officials are pretty worried too.

Britain has devoted vast resources to preventing its citizens from goose-stepping around Germany, Basil Fawlty-style. In the past few months, British officials have noted with alarm that their high-school history curriculum is far too heavily devoted to the Second World War and lacking almost any teaching of the past six decades, leaving most people with an image of Germans that would seem familiar to their grandparents.

A few weeks ago, British minister Charles Clarke made a speech to fans in which he laid down the law: Don't make Hitler salutes. Don't shout Sieg Heil. Please. "It is not a joke. It is not a comic thing to do. It is totally insulting and wrong," he said. "The reason why the German Parliament passed these laws was because the era we are talking about was one of total horror and destruction in Germany. Anyone who thinks it's entertaining to get involved in this sort of thing, I absolutely urge them not to do so."

Just to bring the point home, every British citizen who passes through an airport this month will be issued a pamphlet, titled "Avoiding Penalties," warning them not to make Hitler salutes in Germany.

Actually, German officials are having a difficult time with this one. As much as they don't want a million little English uberfuhrers on their streets, they also don't want to seem like the sort of people who police everyone's party and arrest people on the slightest notice. That, too, has unpleasant historical resonances.

"We don't want people to come to Nuremberg and find 100 police on every corner," said Gerhard Hauptmannl, the police chief of Nuremberg, a silver-haired, mustachioed man whose physical resemblance to Bismarck can be misleading. "This feeling of tolerance and openness is paramount."

Tolerance and openness have become something of a national creed for Germans, and the World Cup has played a big part in that. Every German remembers the country's surprise victory of 1954. After the long, terrible decade after the war, during which profound shame was mixed with deep poverty and starvation, the win was the first time Germans were allowed to feel proud of anything national, or really anything at all. It coincided with the emergence of a powerful new economy, and in most German minds it marks the birth of a new, kinder sort of national pride.

Most countries didn't have to go through such a catharsis. To German eyes, the violent histrionics of visiting soccer hooligans (and sometimes, as with the racist chants of eastern German fans, of their own) looks like a window into the painful past.

"The people of Nuremberg are very, very afraid because of the English hooligans," says Matthias Hamann, of the city's Germanic National Museum. He is the curator of an extraordinary new exhibition titled "What is German," designed to coincide with the World Cup. In intriguing visual fashion, it examines the world's image, and the German self-image, of "Germanness" as it has changed over the years.

In the centre of a room of the exhibition devoted to "daily life," full of postcards and vacuum cleaners, there is a jarring set of images from the Holocaust. "This is because in your thinking, as a German, you are always having to think about it -- because if you don't, then others will. The Holocaust is an obstacle you have to confront if you want to get beyond it in daily life."

A blacked-out bust of Hitler, at the culmination of a section on the desire for power (making the case that he marked this desire's end), is flanked by two more modern German icons of lesser desires: a tobacco ad showing two men simply relaxing and a souvenir photo, resembling a Christian icon, of German race-car driver Michael Schumacher. (Sports heroes are still allowed to be subjects of mass adulation.)

"Every World Cup creates its own dynamic, and in Germany, every World Cup victory, in '54 and '74 and '90, creates its own debate on national identity," Mr. Hamann said as he showed off his exhibition. "This time around, we decided that this World Cup should not be the reason but rather an occasion for such a discussion."

But are English fans really the antithesis of that tolerant vision? They certainly once were: In the 1980s and 1990s, many countries were ready to ban British soccer teams, for the terrible violence and racial hatred unleashed by their infamous hooligans, who would routinely destroy entire cities.

But, according to London soccer chronicler Mark Perryman, something changed dramatically in 1996. That was when the British team ceased to exist, and the old empire was divided into Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England (only the latter of which usually qualifies for the World Cup). By replacing the Union Jack with the St. George's Cross, and a white-skinned team with one containing distinctly black and distinctly English players, a new attitude was born.

That doesn't mean England fans are nice. It's still routine for them to utter chants such as, "I'd rather be a Paki than a Turk," and, of course, make Hitler salutes. But the British police last month seized the passports of the 4,000 fans considered the most violent, preventing them from leaving the country, and gave photos of the rest to the German police.

Besides, the British fans are no longer considered the worst. For racism, the Spaniards and Italians hold that distinction these days, with the Serbs close behind. According to German officials, the Poles are now the worst for violence, especially on German soil.

But the new German approach is an interesting sort of aikido: To prevent a violent clash of nationalisms, the German police have decided to rid themselves of nationalism in their policing. More than 300 foreign officers, including 70 each from England and Poland, are coming over to police their own fans. They have been granted full powers of arrest under their laws, as if they were on their home soil.

They will be accompanied by 250,000 German cops, including 30,000 military police -- every single officer in the country. They will all be sending their information to two operations centres, one in the Rhine town of Neuss, with 150 full-time staff who have been trained at a secretive "hooligan camp," and one in Berlin, with a giant room full of video monitors.

A hallmark of this policing is that it is meant to be invisible: It uses intelligence, donated from the participant countries in Europe, to keep things under control without having to send baton-wielding police onto the streets until things really get crazy (as they might).

If you read between the video monitors, you might see a message here: German officials are not so worried about actual violent clashes. Those things are well under control, a routine concern in the modern, expensive, high-surveillance city. What worries the Germans most of all is symbolism.

For anyone to appear too nationalistic and aggressive at this most national and aggressive of events would be bad, they feel, but for Germans to appear so would be worse. They have spent months visiting the homes and workplaces of every single German fan thought to be potentially violent, issuing stern and embarrassing warnings, and telling them they'll be watched, in hopes of guilting them out of acting boorish. And they've done everything they can to keep their police from appearing too, well, police-ish.

"We are going to have a zero-tolerance policy on Nazi images," says Mr. Maly, the Nuremberg mayor. "But you should know that zero tolerance doesn't mean we will take everyone who is a little bit drunk and starts acting a bit silly and throw them in jail. We don't want to seem that way."

Note: a garbled sentence in last week's column made it sound as if Hugo Chavez is ruling Argentina. He is strictly Venezuela's problem.

dsaunders@globeandmail.com