«Who is Thomas Mueller?» - The average German and their star

Thomas Mueller may as well be called Max Mustermann, the name which stands for the average German - John Smith in English, if you will. The main difference is that one Thomas Mueller is also a football superstar. Hamburg (dpa) - We are never alone, not at the post office, airport check-in or at the registry office. There's always the questions. "Which street do you live in again?" or "Can you give me your date of birth again? We have a number of Thomas Muellers in the system." Thomas Mueller may be the most common combination of names among the 80 million people in Germany. Nobody knows exactly how many there are. Even without exact statistics, it's not really fun to put our name in Google. All we see for the first who-knows-how-many pages are stories about that Thomas Mueller - the German footballer who is slowly becoming
the biggest star of the 2014 World Cup. And we never really find the Thomas Mueller we're actually looking for. But maybe this World Cup is also a chance for us, the other Thomas Muellers out there. No one outside of Germany really knows how many of us exist. But thanks to the Bayern Munich star, the eyes of the people we meet will get a little bit bigger when we say our name. Sure, there are way too many Thomas Muellers. But there are enough that one film maker made a whole film about the name - kind of like a road movie trying to find out more about the statistics on the average German. The name of the film is "Wer ist Thomas Mueller? ("Who is Thomas Mueller?") and it premiered in German cinemas in March. The film's author and director, Christian Heynen, visited a number of men named Thomas Mueller and asked them about their everyday life and their viewpoints.
He met a successful stock market analyst in Bavaria who has long grown used to his dime-a-dozen name, adding: "If you're going to be called Mueller, then it doesn't matter that your first name is Thomas too." Heynen also met a musician named Thomas Mueller and a comedian called Thomas Mueller and a pastor by the name of ... you guessed it, Thomas Mueller. In addition, Heynen presented some pretty depressing statistics about the average German. According to the film, "Thomas Mueller" works 41.9 hours a week, drinks two glasses of beer per day and is generally considered a square. He's 1.78m tall, has blond hair and rents an 87-square-metre flat. On average, Thomas Mueller has sex every three days, usually with his wife, who is most commonly called Sabine Mueller, according to statistics. And then Heynen meets our big star, the footballer Thomas Mueller. In contrast to the average Mueller, who according to statistics in the film doesn't partake in sports and is about 5kg overweight, the German international is very fit and very popular. And the Bayern Munich star has come to terms with his common name. "I know that I am a representative of Germany," said perhaps the most famous of Thomas Muellers of all time. "But I just try to be myself. And since I am apparently the average German, it fits really well that I am just me. And I fit in well with the middle of the population." # dpa