Not even Bayern Munich, however, can draw international crowds like the Oktoberfest, the city's annual tribute to Germany's national beverage.

Six million tourists jam into Munich, a city of 1.3 million just north of the Alps and hosts for the World Cup's opening match, to drink six million litres of beer over the fortnight.

"We don't want to be thought of only as 'the beer city'," Munich deputy mayor Christine Strobl said.

"We'd like to be thought of as a soccer capital but with Oktoberfest I guess it's just automatic that people think of beer first."

Fashionable and fashion-conscious, Munich is Germany's most expensive city and arguably its cleanest despite the annual beer-drinking orgy in cavernous tents set up on a meadow near the central railway station.

Home to luxury carmaker BMW, Munich emerged after World War Two as a thriving centre for aerospace and high-tech industries that belie its heritage as a poor rural farming area. Locals proudly boast that Munich has managed to combine laptops and lederhosen.

SUPERIORITY COMPLEX

Yet Munich is -- for Germans who live beyond the so-called "white sausage equator" that runs north of the Bavarian capital -- sometimes a rather obnoxious place where everything is said to be superior.

Munich's schools are better, wages are higher, unemployment is lower and with the Alps and pristine lakes just beyond city limits, locals boast that the quality of life is better. A recent poll found Munich men to be the happiest in all of Germany.

That superiority complex in the largely Roman Catholic state of Bavaria is reflected by Bayern Munich, four times European Cup winners and by far the most successful club in German soccer history.

Bayern are a target of disdain around Germany for regularly poaching the top talent from the rest of the league.

"Soccer plays a hugely important role in the lives of a lot of people in Munich because of all the success Bayern Munich has had," Strobl said. "It's a big part of Munich's identity.

"Expectations on the team to win the Bundesliga every year are high," she added. "It would probably be a good thing for a challenger to emerge in the league somewhere. But, for Munich, it's great that we win the title almost every year."

The city sees itself as a post-war winner even if its name is tarnished by two dark chapters in 20th century history: the 1972 Olympics where 11 Israeli athletes were killed and a 1938 conference that Hitler used to grab parts of Czechoslovakia.

At the Munich Olympics, Palestinian gunmen killed two Israelis at the Olympic Village and took nine others hostage. After hours of negotiations, the nine hostages and five gunmen were killed in a shootout during a failed airport rescue effort.

HITLER MEETING

"Munich" also became a synonym for "appeasement" after the 1938 meeting here between Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler.

The British prime minister tried to persuade the Nazi dictator not to send troops into Czechoslovakia by allowing him to take over the German-speaking part of that country. World War Two started a year later anyway when Hitler invaded Poland.

Munich, where the Nazis made their first aborted attempt to take power in 1923 with Hitler's beer hall putsch, survived the war less damaged than Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne.

Munich also profited from West Germany's post-war "Economic Miracle" with corporate flights by firms such as Siemens from Berlin. Even after reunification Munich kept its Cold War booty.

The city hosted the 1974 World Cup final when hosts West Germany upset the heavily favoured Netherlands 2-1.

It is Germany's most glamorous and most liveable big city. Its central park, the bucolic "Englischer Garten", lies next to the trendy "Schwabing" district with popular nightclubs, restaurants and cafes.

"It's a beautiful city," said Strobl. "It's a city with a lot of glamour but you can also see people who still wear lederhosen."

The city's sparkling new 66,016-seat stadium that cost 340 million euros and opened just last year is an apt illustration of Munich's quest to have the best of everything and is second in size only to Berlin's stadium for the World Cup.