World Cup or EM letters from the writer Moritz Rinke are almost a tradition in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

This time, Chancellor Angela Merkel will sit down after every German game and write a letter to the national coach.

They will be about saying goodbye together.

From the lonely life at the top.

And of secret longings.

Dear Jogi,

I was seventeen years old, you were sixteen years old, and now we're going to stop together.

You after the EM, me after the federal election.

Hopefully you will somehow still be the European champion, I almost don't care about the federal election if the better one should win.

I once looked at some old pictures of us.

I like to look at pictures from before and then wonder how this young, delicate girl that I once was endured up there for so long.

Do you sometimes ask yourself how you endured it for so long?

Look how young we were, how cute!

Exactly the same hairstyle!

The same inner "focus", as you would say, is already recognizable (you even have hints of a diamond!) You could also be my brother.

Only the fathers of our success were very different, you had Klinsmann, I had Kohl, you can't compare them.

It's a shame that it didn't work out against the French in the first group game.

Stupid own goal.

Are you angry now that you brought Hummels back?

If you had asked me for advice, I would have advised against it, it always takes revenge if someone is chilled and then brought back.

If I had brought Friedrich Merz back then, he would have scored an own goal for me.

Do you think Hummels did it especially? My husband, with whom I watched the game, immediately said, the way Hummels shot him in, he would have had the feeling that he did it extra, he could have shot somewhere else and not exactly into the corner, you have to get in there first. Only Berti Vogts had done something like that in German history, said the reporter, at the 1978 World Cup, oh, I was still unsuspecting in the GDR.

But don't take my husband so seriously either, he had a busy week. At the G-7 summit in Cornwall, he had to talk to Macron's wife for hours, do you know her? She's a philosopher, she gave him a two-hour lecture on Guy de Maupassant and Arthur Schopenhauer, at dinner he sat next to Joe Biden and had to listen to his critical talk about China, that gets on my nerves now, I'll have my husband Without further ado to sit next to the Queen, no idea whether you can then correctly evaluate this shot by Hummels.

Wouldn't the back four have been better, as some say?

Our team's game felt a bit like a children's birthday party to me.

We were allowed to do everything, but as soon as it got dangerous, the French took good care and took the playground equipment away from us.

Perhaps we are missing the cheeky, the snotty, the bold and the wild?

I miss Schweinsteiger!

Or one like Sparwasser.

Was everything better in the past?

When I started, I had a great cabinet: Müntefering, Schäuble, Steinbrück, Steinmeier, Gabriel, Scholz, many from the SPD, yes, but if you compare that with all the fuss I have today.

How is it with you?

Has it got worse for you from year to year, even though you became world champion?

My second cabinet already consisted of Rösler, Brüderle, Ramsauer and the like, now I'm even with Spahn.

Who do you have?

I don't even know most of them anymore.

I really miss Basti Schweinsteiger.

People who carry me away, but who still carries you away today?

People who dream me and make me believe in something again?

If I'm being honest, I don't even know who to vote for in the federal election.

Your Angela

PS: I am reading poems about saying goodbye.

If you lose against Portugal too, I'll send you something from Rilke.

Or an ode from Holderlin.

Moritz Rinke is one of the leading playwrights in Germany. His new novel “The longest day of Pedro Fernández García” will be published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in August.