While the English gorge on Boxing Day matches today, the soccer stadiums of Germany are locked, the lights shut off and the stands empty.

The Bundesliga and the lower domestic leagues in Germany are novel among the top nations in Europe for not playing all the way through the holidays. It’s one of the many appealing aspects of German soccer, along with the venues, ticket prices and club relations with fans that also elicit winsome praise from the English.

Winterpause wasn’t mentioned by The New York Times in this takeout on the renaissance of the German domestic game, which focuses on the overhaul of its youth programs, the advantage of being in a more economically stable European nation, and an aesthetically pleasing style of play:

“ ‘Once the Germans have decided to transform, to reform, they do it,’ Emmanuel Hembert, an expert in the business of soccer at the consultancy A. T. Kearney, said. ‘It has been the case for the labor rules; it’s the case for football where they changed their model; and it’s had a very positive impact.’ ”

But for as industrious as Germans are, they are just as savvy about observing the importance of dialing it down. Even before the German break, Borussia Dortmund proved startling in the Champions League, advancing over English champion Manchester City and self-immolating Real Madrid.

When Dortmund returns to the fray of the Bundesliga and Europe in mid-January, it will be well-rested. That’s not always a guarantee for success in the second half of a grueling season. But it’s sane and utterly civilized and a needed counterpart to the endless, almost joyless grind of the Premier League, where the end of it all, somebody from Manchester is going to win.

As Grant Wahl points out, the Bundesliga needs a better TV deal in the U.S., but that’s all that seems to be missing.

In “Tor! The Story of German Football,” Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger’s absorbing historical survey, he quotes iconic player Helmut Schön about competing during World War II, including the 1944 national championship finals between his Sporting Club Dresden and the Air Force Sports Club of Hamburg shortly after D-Day:

“The Allied Forces had landed in France, in Belarus the Russians began their largest offensive. Didn’t we feel fear? This question, people tend to forget, didn’t present itself to Germans. The map of Europe still led us to believe in strength. Norway and Denmark, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary — they all were ‘firmly in German hands’. No one realised how quickly it could all tumble down.”

Noah Davis settles in on that match in a fine piece today on SB Nation, with Schön at the center of the encounter at the Berlin Olympiastadion. “Last champions of the Third Reich” details the symbolic need Hitler felt for the Nazi regime to attend, since it was the venue for the 1936 Olympics.

Yet there was the fear of Allied bombing, war-weary German citizens didn’t fill the place up despite cheap admission prices and some conscripted players had to work to get military leave in order to show up. As Davis explains, it wasn’t a complete diversion:

“In less than an hour, the fans and players would have to return to the reality of Germany at war. But now, the game was on, and it remained close. Soccer was the main event. Dresden attacked as the second period started, but Hamburg captain Reinhold Münzenberg, a defender who played more for the national team between 1930 and 1939 than anyone else did, marshaled his troops in response. The Luftwaffe Eagle sat prominently on the chest of his LSV uniform as he urged his men to maintain their formation. It was, briefly, a valiant defensive effort by a team being overrun.”

Davis draws from Hesse-Lichtenberger’s work, especially his emphasis on how important it was for the Nazis for soccer to continue during the war, mostly for domestic morale. Both the German championship finals and the German Cup finals were played through 1944, to be followed by several years of inactivity only after the fighting had stopped.

The national team played friendlies until 1942 under Sepp Herberger, who spent the early years of Hitler’s dictatorship in charge of the famous Breslau-Elf team.

By contrast, the English domestic league play was not contested between 1939 and 1946, and its FA Cup was suspended from 1940 to 1944.

West Germany rose fast after the war, upsetting Hungary under Herberger’s guidance to win the 1954 World Cup, admitted back into the family of sporting nations at the dawn of the Wirtschaftswunder.

Schön, whose family survived the devastating Dresden bombings, managed West Germany to the 1966 World Cup finals, won by England at London’s Wembley Stadium in Geoff Hurst’s memorable (and still controversial) two-goal performance.

That event was the international coming out for a young Franz Beckenbauer, who was captain of West Germany’s World Cup-winning team in 1974 and coached it to its last title in 1990. The star of that team was Jürgen Klinsmann, the current U.S. national team head coach.

Davis does well to illustrate how this final wartime sporting interlude, near the end of a tragic period of German and world history, offered a flash of normalcy, if not a completely joyous one.

Hesse-Lichtenberger’s full book, written in English and which I’m finishing now, tells a very rich story of a nation’s embrace of a sport that has been one of its brightest post-war cultural legacies.

At SI.com, Raphael Honigstein talks to supporters of German Bundesliga club Borussia Dortmund who are threatening to boycott next weekend’s “Revierderby” with Schalke beccause of nearly 50 percent “surcharge” in some ticket prices specifically for that match.

They’ve also set up their own website (auf deutsch) to make their case.

What I’m reading about sports and the media on Monday, July 5:

• The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review examines the travails of the LPGA as the U.S. Women’s Open gets underway at Oakmont Country Club. The recession and the lack of high-profile American stars to succeed the retired Annika Sorenstam and Lorena Ochoa have given new commissioner Michael Whan plenty to tackle. He sounds like many of his predecessors over the years, however, with this age-old pronouncement that is unlikely to resonate:

“There’s nothing wrong with our product. We just need to have more people see it.”

Tell that to women’s sports activists who can’t be bothered with something that isn’t related directly to Title IX, or can’t be blamed on the male sports culture. Sports business has never been their strong suit, but the ailing women’s sports industry needs all the backing it can get. The challenges facing the 60-year-old LPGA are far more critical than whether cheerleading should be declared a college sport, but guess what is getting most of the heat and light this summer?

Argh, exhale! It’s only Monday, right? To say that I’m restless about the way things are, and especially the conventional “wisdom” that informs perceptions of women in sports from the very women who claim to exalt them, would be a severe understatement.

• Another topic I’ve gotten really interested in following seriously in recent months is athlete development. My friend Tom Dunmore at Pitch Invasion today rounds up some good pieces exploring how the German youth soccer system was completely overhauled a decade ago, and is now yielding many of the young players who have been setting the World Cup on fire. This article from Ralph Honigstein at SI.com also explains how at the very youngest levels, skill development and the mastery of fundamentals is stressed over competition. Hello, USA?

• Stefan Fatsis has left South Africa, but gives the whole FIFA aristocracy a good spanking over at The New Republic’s World Cup blog. Like many American sports journalists digging into the politics, cronyism and corruption at FIFA, Fatsis is aghast at what he sees. These guys make the IOC look like pikers, but as the controversy over refereeing illustrates, Sepp Blatter and the boys are accountable to no one.