The year finished with West Germany retaining the Davis Cup, this time on home soil against Sweden. It was a great triumph, which featured the second of the three best matches I ever played. I had beaten Edberg on the Friday, but Eric Jelen and I had a marathon doubles on Saturday, which we won 6-4 in the fifth, and with Edberg favourite against Charly Steeb in the fifth, there was a lot of pressure on me to beat Wilander in the first of Sunday’s matches to get the third point. I beat him 6-2, 6-0, 6-2, which has to be one of my best performances, not just the tennis but taking into account the importance of the match. And I did it with my friends, so it’s different to winning a Grand Slam. But it was perhaps the time when I began to be less German and more international.

It was just five weeks after the Berlin Wall had come down and it was a remarkable time. I was raised as a proud German who had represented the national team, but I was living outside Germany, because I felt more at ease abroad than in Germany. I had the feeling that in Germany people always wanted to pigeonhole me, and I always fought that – there was this internal fight that I didn’t want to become what they saw me as.

Suddenly, here was a situation where everyone was rejoicing at the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. I rejoiced too, but I was less comfortable with everyone saying that the reunification of Germany would be the next step. In a couple of interviews, I said ‘Who says? – is reunification really the right thing?’ That didn’t go down too well back home. And after reunification in October 1990, I did a long interview in which I said that, just because we have reunified with our brothers and sisters, it doesn’t mean we’re the greatest nation in the world. We have a history, we have to be careful not to repeat it, so we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves; we shouldn’t become too arrogant or too powerful. I was basically saying ‘Hold on, we’ve got to stay humble, we’ve got to keep our feet on the ground’. At a time when everyone was celebrating reunification, I was going against the majority opinion, even though the majority liked me. It probably made me better positioned internationally, but didn’t necessarily make me more popular in Germany.