On June 12, 1974, on the first page of the feature pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, there was an interview that the writer Eckhard Henscheid had with his colleague Ror Wolf.
The soccer world championship began a day later in Frankfurt, and Henscheid asked Wolf about the optimal composition of the German midfield.
Wolf mentioned three names, Henscheid brought in a fourth: “And what about Netzer?
What is his psychosomatic condition? ”Soothing information:“ His psychosomatic condition is good. ”
Patrick Bahners
Features correspondent in Cologne and responsible for “humanities”.
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A year earlier, Henscheid had submitted the proposal to national coach Helmut Schön to team up with Netzer for Bernd Hölzenbein from Frankfurt (nicknamed "Wood") in his first novel, "Die Vollidioten", whose narrator is called that, in the first edition only to subscribers As the author reports, with mock casualness, Netzer “was born on the same day as me, on September 14th, but three years later”.
Strangely enough, above the memo for Schön there is the inter-chapter heading “Interim balance sheet”, although the novel had not been about the national team until then. In a philosophical attack, the narrator allows himself to be carried away to contemplate that against “a spurt of Netzer into the opposing penalty area”, “even the love of Mr. The quick start of the playmaker from Mönchengladbach could seem quite irrelevant, much more fantastic than usual in love plots anyway, because the object of Mr. Jackopp's love, Miss Czernatzke, was by no means so persistently courted by him, as the enthusiastic narrator assures.
Karl Heinz Bohrer wrote his famous sentence in the FAZ in 1973 about the thrill of Netzer's advances from the depths of space and at the same time formulated his theory of suddenness, of beauty through interruption, in a flash. In the novel, Henscheid praised "the ingenuity of Hölzenbein's often - in contrast to Netzer - inconspicuous, secret plays and feinting, his passes into the open space that make the opponent look ridiculous". He switched himself in as a congenial partner of Netzer, characterized with a ruse his own art of inconspicuousness, the opening of the game through digression, with which he is actually aiming for beauty through context.
Ten years ago, Henscheid said in an interview: "Netzer was not as close to me as Bernd Hölzenbein, who was competing with him at the time, an almost forgotten magician on the ball." Three years before Günter Netzer, Eckhard Henscheid is eighty years old today.