German History Vol. 27, No. 3, pp.

414428

The Peoples Sport? Popular Sport and Fans in the Later Years of the German Democratic Republic
Jutta Braun
The popular protesters in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the autumn and winter of 1989 were claiming a wide variety of basic democratic rights from the rulers of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED). These protests against those in power encompassed, among other issues, relationships within the sporting world:
Sport in the GDRan enormous feather in the cap of both the Party and the governmentis not rooted in the people. The necessity for GDR sportsmen and sportswomen to shine in the Olympic medal tables has meant that Olympic sports have been given a higher level of support.1

There was a long list of regrettable shortcomings. Criticisms included the neglect of popular sport, the underfunding of sports facilities and clothing, and the low priority given to some sports while those with a high profile were disproportionately well fostered. This state of affairs could seem surprising, since the SED had always attributed a central political role to Massensport,2 as it had to high-level sports. Every person, in every place, should take part in sport once a week, Walter Ulbricht had proclaimed in 1959. In the 1980s, widely-publicized SED action campaigns urged people to Run a Mile (Eile mit Meile) and Run for your health (Lauf Dich gesund). These popular appeals, however, do not accurately reflect the grim reality of everyday sports in the GDR. An energetic debate has arisen among historians and the wider public in Western Germany as to the value one can or should attach to exploring Alltagsgeschichte in assessing the nature of the GDR. There is a general sense that an excessive focus on everyday matters could play down the ways in which the dictatorship exercised repression.3 The journalist Regina Mnch has rightly argued, however, that an examination limited to state security, torture and murders at the [Berlin] Wall cannot explain the 1989 revolution.
When tens of thousands of young people packed their rucksacks that summer, in order to vanish to the West through the hole in the iron curtain, fleeing their parents mendacious country, they were not fleeing the threat of being detained by the Stasi. They were fleeing because they found daily life and the lack of freedom unbearable.4

1 Neues

Forum Leipzig (4 Dec. 1989), quoted in Giselher Spitzer, Hans Joachim Teichler and Klaus Reinartz (eds), Schlsseldokumente zum DDR-Sport (Aachen, 1998), pp. 328331. 2 Massensport was the East German description which encompassed all that the West understood as popular sports (Breitensport, Alltagssport). [It is translated here as popular sport(s) - Trans.] 3 These reflections have originated mainly from historians of the Institut fr Zeitgeschichte. Martin Sabrow, Director of the Zentrum fr Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, has defended the need for increased research into everyday life. Sabrow has written about this debate in Martin Sabrow et al. (eds), Wohin treibt die DDR-Erinnerung? Dokumentation einer Debatte (Gttingen, 2007), pp. 369432. 4 Regina Mnch, Pathos des Alltagsdie DDR ist nicht zu verstehen, wenn man das alltgliche Leben im totalitren Staat ignoriert, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)(28 June 2006), in Sabrow et al., Wohin treibt, pp. 329331, here p. 330.

The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society. All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghp034

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This suggests it was the many restrictions, both great and small, and the unreasonable demands of daily life under the reality of socialist rule that tipped young people into despair and drove them out of the country. The historian Mary Fulbrook, however, takes a different view in her most recent study. She seeks to explain that many inhabitants of the GDR perceived their everyday live to be perfectly normal.5 This essay, in the light of recent research into everyday sport in the GDR, will seek to locate the analysis of sport in the continuing historical debate, and in particular to take a closer look at Fulbrooks starting point. As an instrument for researching social history, sport is at an enormous advantage, in that it is a regular and unquestioned feature of the cultural life of a large proportion of the population. People actively take part in sport, and are passive spectators and fans, and this analysis will consider both these aspects. The focus will be on the 1970s and 1980s, since during this period there was radical change both for those who took part in popular sport and for those who were passive spectators, change which laid bare potential conflict fault-lines between the state and its citizens. The social history of the GDR was implicated in and affected by far wider trends that were not merely political in the narrow sense of the word6and this was especially true of sport during the last two decades of the GDR. The reality of socialist life was ill prepared for the international innovations that took hold of popular sport, especially the sudden growth of the fitness movement, and the increasing popularity of Trendsport (fashionable sports). The investigation here is twofold: we shall analyse first the largely instinctive rejection of any new development by the SED and its popular sport organization, the Deutscher Turn- und Sportbund (DTSB). Second, we shall seek to establish how sports enthusiasts, in spite of such opposition, managed to anchor firmly in the consciousness of everyday GDR society their own image of an alternative way of practising sport. Such results are significant if one sees the GDR as a participatory dictatorship,7 in that they show how the people both had the ability to shape their society, and availed themselves of it. A second new feature of sport, which deeply concerned the SED leadership, was the growing phenomenon of football fans. The fan clubs, with their wild behaviour, operated in what Rainer Weinert calls an autonomous niche (autonome Handlungsarenen)8, which simply did not fit in with the socialist project community. It is not yet clear to what extent the regime tolerated the football world, which was heavily influenced by youth culture, and to what extent it made its existence difficult. Fulbrook postulates that the younger generation, who had grown up under socialism, should arguably have internalized the prevailing socialist values, and perceive them to represent normality. Can this be evidenced in this group?9 In order understand the faultlines that separated the state and those of its citizens who took part in or watched popular and spectator sports in the 1970s and 1980s, we must
5 Mary

Fulbrook, The Peoples State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (Yale, 2005) (Published in German as Ein ganz normales Leben. Alltag und Gesellschaft in der DDR, Darmstadt, 2008). 6 Fulbrook, Peoples State, p. 11. 7 Fulbrook discusses this concept in Peoples State, esp. pp. 252ff. 8 Rainer Weinert, Wirtschaftsfhrung unter dem Primat der Parteipolitik, in Theo Pirker et al. (eds), Der Plan als Befehl und Fiktion (Opladen 1995), p. 288. 9 Fulbrook notes that The GDR lasted, it should be remembered, for forty yearslong enough for new generations go be socialised, to grow to maturity and to experience their everyday life as perfectly normal, Peoples State, p. 8.

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first remind ourselves of the essential raison dtre for the GDR sports provision, as defined by the Party: it was the relentless striving for Olympic gold, and the desire to be the polarized twin10 of West Germany.

The Two Classes Within GDR Sports

High-level sport has long been seen by historians as the odd one out in the competition between the two Germanies. However unsuccessful the GDR was in the decisive sectors of economic and social life, it was successful in sports.11 And indeed, from the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico City onwards, East Germany consistently outperformed its western neighbour in the medal tables. Over the last twenty years, a steady flow of revelations have gradually made it very clear that the reason for this East German success in the medal tables lay to a large extent in the doping to which the athletes were subjected, at times with brutality.12 There were however other decisive factors in the success of this small country, which with a population of only sixteen million managed not only to beat the Federal Republic but also, in the winter Olympics in February 1984 in Sarajevo, to beat its big brother the Soviet Union and take the lead in the medal table. The key factor here was the division of sporting activity into two distinct groups. The Party leadership decided in the memorable Leistungssportbeschluss13 of 1969 on rigid rationalization measures that were to prove remarkably effective. Sports were divided into Sport 1, which were to be given special encouragement, and Sport 2, which were to receive less support. The first category encompassed the sports in which it was possible for an athlete to gain several medals, such as swimming, rowing or track and field athletics. Sports such as water-polo, which required a high level of investment in terms of training and facilities to equip a whole team for the possibility of gaining one medal between them, were downgraded outright to Sport 2. From then on, Sport 2 activities had to cope with restrictions and disadvantages, including low levels of investment and resources, limited media exposure, and a ban on any future participation in international competitions. This was a profound shock to the practitioners of the sports affected. The national East German basketball team were in the last stages of training for the European championships when they received the grim news of their downgrading. Six of the seven players immediately left the SED in protest against the decision, and their trainer spent several weeks in a clinic following a nervous breakdown.14 In parallel with this bipartite division, a completely new system was set up to scout for future sports stars, called the

10 Hans

Gnter Hockerts, Introduction, in Hockerts (ed.), Drei Wege deutscher Sozialstaatlichkeit: NS-Diktatur, Bundesrepublik und DDR im Vergleich (Munich, 1998), p. 8. 11 Horst Mller, Worin lag das national Verbindende in der Epoche der Teilung, in Hans Gnter Hockerts (ed.), Koordinaten deutscher Geschichte in der Epoche des Ost-West-Konflikts (Munich, 2004) pp. 307324, here p. 311. 12 Jutta Braun, Dopen fr Deutschland. Die Diskussion im vereinten Sport 19901992, in Klaus Latzel and Lutz Niethammer (eds), Hormone und Hochleistung. Doping zwischen Ost und West (Cologne, 2008), pp. 151170. 13 Grundlinie der Entwicklung des Leistungssports in der DDR bis 1980, in Hans Joachim Teichler, Die Sportbeschlsse des Politbros (Cologne, 2002), p. 567. 14 Gnther Wonneberger, Die Auswirkungen des Leistungssportbeschlusses von 1969 auf den Basketballsport in LeipzigErinnerungen eines Zeitzeugen, in Giselher Spitzer and Harald Braun (eds), Der geteilte deutsche Sport. Tagung der dvs-Sektion Sportgeschichte vom 24.26. Mrz 1995 in Potsdam (Cologne, 1997), pp. 155158.

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Einheitliche Sichtung und Auswahl (ESA). From the start of the 1970s, every school child in the republic was meticulously weighed and measured to assess their potential for specific sporting activities. It was explained that this was because the GDR must find every hidden talent, and foster it.15 This process, however, was not aimed simply at recognizing sporting ability, but also at channelling that ability. The state directed talented children towards the sports in which they might gain the highest number of medals. Football, for instance, lost many talented players to the sports which enjoyed political favour,16 and lost much of its former vigour. In 1986 a West German reporter asked the coach of the Carl Zeiss football club in Jena, Lothar Kurbjuweit, why there were so few tall players among GDR football teams. He answered bitterly, All our tall football players are rowers.17 As well as the Olympic rationale, there were also purely ideological grounds for the banning of some sports. Golf, for example, was very soon declared by the Party to be out of favour in the newly established GDR, because it was seen as elitist and bourgeois. Golfers were not allowed to form any kind of sporting association, there were no golf clubs and no courses. By 1951, the last surviving golf course in Oberhof had been turned into a field, to the slogan Gemse statt Golf (vegetables instead of golf). Fewer than thirty active golf players remained in East Germany, and they travelled regularly into Czechoslovakia, where there was a continuing golfing tradition. GDR citizens were allowed access to the facilities in Brno and Prague, and training was given in a barter exchange for bed linen, ski boots or holiday accommodation in Saxony.18 This segregation in sports, as in other sectors of society, led to an impoverishment in both variety and free development19a process which was typical of the GDR, but paid off in terms of the image of the country abroad. The GDR was the model pupil20 of the Olympic movement, and for the lifetime of the country its international prestige was due in large part to success in high-profile sports. The social price paid for this by some sectors of the population raised little interest abroad.

Popular Sports
The priority placed by the SED leadership on gaining Olympic gold medals led to significant neglect in sports policy of the provision of sports facilities and sports equipment for the wider population. This situation became more acute in the 1970s and 1980s, when the growing interest in the fitness movement, which had originated in the US, reached the GDR. In the West, the enthusiasm for fitness activities had already given rise to significant changes in the pattern of sports facilities. There was a perceptible drop in numbers belonging to associations, as sports enthusiasts took to the open air, or to the
15 Seminarplan fr den Komplex Nachwuchsleistungssport, March 1971, in SAPMO BA DY 30/IVA2/18/3. 16 Football, because of its popularity, was put into the Sport 1 category, but recruitment was nevertheless neglected. 17 Der Fuball-Trainer aus Jena leistet sich Trume, weil er Realist ist, FAZ (18 Sept. 1986). 18 Flucht vom Gemseacker, Berliner Zeitung (10 Sept. 2005). 19 Rainer

M. Lepsius has pointed to this desire to eradicate differences as a key aspect of GDR society: Rainer M. Lepsius, Die Institutionenordnung als Rahmenbedingung der Sozialgeschichte der DDR, in Hartmut Kaelble, Jrgen Kocka and Hartmut Zwahr (eds), Sozialgeschichte der DDR (Stuttgart, 1994), pp. 1730. 20 Die DDR zeigt sich als Musterschler der Olympischen Idee, Sddeutsche Zeitung (10 May 1985).

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gyms that were opening in many places, in order to build physical strength.21 Individual efforts to improve health and wellbeing seemed to many a more attractive option than communal efforts in an association-led sport. Sports equipment and clothing companies supplied the changing and growing market for fashionable outfits suited to the new types of activity. Practitioners of popular sports in East Germany, however, did not have access to commercially produced specialist fitness facilities and equipment, and had to make do with what the state provided. There were two major shortages here. In the first place, sports facilities were affected by the general deterioration in infrastructure that pervaded the GDR. A study in 1986 of sports facilities, by the Wissenschaftlich Technisches Zentrum, described the catastrophic condition of both open-air and covered swimming pools. The SED reacted to this unwelcome truth in characteristic fashion, brushing off the author and the editor responsible for the report, accusing them of political error and expressing disapprobation.22 Although official studies hushed up the reality of the situation, the extent of the degradation was evident in the large number of complaints made at the time. In the second place, there was fierce anger that the miserable state of provision for popular sports clearly resulted from the exclusive allocation of sports resources and facilities to elite sports. One sports amateur wrote indignantly to the sports administration of the DTSB in the mid-1980s:
I must tell you that the widely proposed option to get out into natures sports ground sounds impressive, but in fact this means that the DTSB authorities have made life very easy for themselves [It was evident that all they had left to offer to] the many sports enthusiasts was the forest, since the modern sports grounds, the stadia, the swimming pools, the dedicated medical care, the sports organizations, and so on, were all reserved for the top athletes. The ordinary worker who simply wants to enjoy his sport after work is simply left out in the cold.23

In reaction to the jogging movement in the US and the Trimm-Trab programme in the Federal Republic, the GDR set up the state-organized Eile mit Meile movement. It carried the clear signature of socialist planning, offering running meetings, running committees and the notable Friendship runs to commemorate the victory of the Red Army over Hitler fascism.24 The runs were very popular, however, even though the shortage of sports gear undermined that enthusiasm, as demonstrated by various complaints to the DTSB: Dear friends of sports, please give me guidance as to how my family can acquire running shoes. I hadnt gathered that the Eile mit Meile movement was in fact a jog through the citys shops!25 Another complainant addressed himself directly to Manfred Ewald, President of the DTSB, saying that there were
in addition to myself a hundred thousand other long-distance runners affected by the shortage of suitable running shoes, all hoping that the major policies of the DTSB would at last address the needs of the leisure sports enthusiasts. I would like to share the success of our sporting policies not only from reading the paper, but also in the fitness of my own body. Sportsfriend Ewald, I look forward to a concrete answer. With sporting greetings PS: I take size 27 shoes.26

21 Volker

Rittner, Sportvereine und gewandelte Bedrfnisse, in Gunter A. Pilz (ed.), Sport und Verein (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1986), pp. 4355. 22 Hans Joachim Teichler, Sport in der DDR, Deutschlandarchiv, 3 (2004), pp. 414421. 23 Complaint, D.K. to DTSB-Abteilungsleitung, 26 Oct. 1983, SAPMO DY 12 3359. 24 Constanze Bartel, Die Entwicklung des Langlaufs in Deutschland vor und nach der Wiedervereinigung unter besonderer Bercksichtigung des Marathonlaufs (MA thesis, Gttingen University, 2005), p. 47. 25 Complaint, H.N. of Brandenburg, 10 Jan. 1983, SAPMO DY 12/3357. 26 Complaint, D.K., 1 Nov. 1983, SAPMO DY 12/3359.

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This order, sent directly to the highest sporting authority, was not fulfilled. The SED appeared to be fundamentally open-minded towards the growing interest in jogging as a modern development in sport, and the creation of the Meilenbewegung was their attempt to integrate everyday sports in the GDR into the socialist idiom.

The Rennsteiglauf: A Local Initiative Taken Over From Above

The enthusiasm for Trendsport took hold of large numbers of people. It fired both their imagination, and the desire to organize sports events for themselves. In 1973, a group of school and university students in Thringen therefore selected the Rennsteig, a hillcrest footpath in the Thringen forest, to be the route for a new long-distance run. That same year, four of them sucessfully ran the 100km distance on the path: the first Rennsteiglauf 27 had been achieved.28 Private individuals had set up a new sporting tradition, and the run was repeated every year, attracting over 1000 runners by 1976, more than 4000 in 1977, and by 1979 there were 7000 participants. A major attraction of the event was that unlike the Meilenbewegung it was not organized by the state-run DTSB, but was only semi-official, from 1976 under the aegis of the GutMuths Rennsteiglauf Association, a group of private individuals. The DTSB tolerated this initiative as a grey area within GDR sportthough such a thing did not officially exist. Manfred Ewald was critical, disapproving even, of the event, and in the 1980s limited the number of participants to 9000. Application forms became a hot property. In the end, the Party recognized that this popular event had propaganda potential. Members of the local SED leadership infiltrated the events organizing committee, so that its astonishing success could be turned to the advantage of the Party. The posters soon proclaimed slogans such as The Rennsteiglauf, run in honour of the 9th Party Congress of the SED. The events organizers did not objectthe politicization of the event, and its adoption by the Party, ensured its unhindered survival. They were happy to be seen not to be opposing, but to be integrated into the SED. In the view of both organizers and participants, the distinctive nature of the event was that it had not been created from above, but set up by the grass roots.29 Following the example of the Rennsteiglauf, more than forty cross-country runs were initiated during the next few years, such as the Zittauer Gebirgslauf and the Kyffhuser Berglauf. The distinctive nature of the Rennsteiglauf meant that it stayed popular after the 1989 Wende, and unlike the state-run Meilenbewegung it continued after reunification and is now Europes major cross-country running event. The Rennsteiglauf bears out Mary Fulbrooks thesis that the people of the GDR played an active part in shaping their own lives, and taking initiatives30 which could even, as in this case, result in long-lasting change. The Thringen event also belongs to what she calls the penumbra of overlap between what from one perspective can be seen as state, and from another as society.31 Initiative from the people and oversight by the state entered into a symbiosis

27 The Rennsteiglauf is currently a cross-country route 72.7 km long, and is described as an ultramarathon. 28 Information

on how the Rennsteiglauf was set up came from Kai Reinhart and Michael Krger, Herrschafts-Praxis im DDR-Sport, Deutschlandarchiv, 3 (2004), pp. 430438. 29 Interview with Horst Scheler in ibid, p. 438. 30 Fulbrook, Peoples State, p. 295. 31 Ibid, p. 15.

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from which both hoped to benefit. Beyond running, however, attempts to modernize from below were considerably more challenging when the aim was to set up new forms of Trendsport unknown in the GDR.

Sports for Fashion and Fun: Inclusion, Hindrance and Banning

A number of Trendsports,32 mainly originating from the US, swept in the late 1970s and early 1980s through the Federal Republic and into the GDR. Windsurfing, aerobics and bodybuilding all enjoyed a growing popularity, especially among younger sports enthusiasts. State officials found many reasons to object to these imported sports. They wished to avoid Western influence, and attempted to create substitutes for the abhorrent anglicisms introduced by these sports: windsurfing was officially described as Stehbrettsegeln, aerobics became Medizin nach Noten, bodybuilding became Krperkulturistik an introduced term typical of SED-speak, and which was never adopted in the everyday language of sports practitioners. When windsurfing, the mother of all Trendsports,33 became popular in Western Europe at the start of the 1970s, sports enthusiasts in the GDR soon became interested. It was chiefly through West German television that young people in East Germany encountered this new pastime, and they were strongly attracted by its aura of freedom, of the American way of life. The earliest windsurfers built their own boardsdo-ityourself was a familiar solution to East Germans as they coped with the daily shortages in various parts of their lives, and they were used to making and improvising. Polevaulting poles served as masts on the earliest windsurfing boards. It was not until 1976 that commercial production of windsurfing boards began, and it was not able to keep up with the strong demand. Instructions and materials for building your own board were widely bartered. Many had useful contacts in the West: retired GDR citizens visited surfing shops in West Berlin armed with extensive shopping lists from their grandchildren, who wanted to lay their hands on the latest products on the international market. However, the inventive self-build windsurfers were not left to themselves for long: the DTSB stepped in to impose their organizational skills on these wayward enthusiasts. Not that they were permitted to start their own association: the DTSB insisted that they be a part of the East German sailing association (Bund Deutscher Segler, BDS). Unlike the Rennsteiglauf organizers, however, the windsurfers resisted this takeover from above. The conflict between the sailing enthusiasts and the apparently rebellious windsurfers was the logical result of their different disciplines. Sailing is regulated by the rule book, whereas the successful windsurfer remains flexible in his handling of his board. The windsurfers were interested in taking part in the BDS regattas, but beyond this they had no desire to be regulated or structured. The majority of surfers had no interest in mainstream sailing and had a horror of the associated formalities (managing training and competitions, holding official positions). And indeed the DTSB never succeeded in drawing in more than a minority of windsurfers. Practitioners continued to organize
32 The

two German terms Trendsport and Funsport have broadly similar meanings; the term Funsport is used in advertising for both fashion sports and extreme sports. 33 Markus Lamprecht and Hanspeter Stamm, Vom avantgardistischen Lebensstil zur Massenfreizeit. Eine Analyse des Entwicklungsmusters von Trendsportarten, Sportwissenschaft, 3/4 (1998), pp. 370387, here p. 375.

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themselves and their Funsport in a lively and independent way, centred on Rostock, Berlin and Leipzig. The BDS made vain attempts to tame the feral windsurfers and to tempt them with membership cards by propagating the motto Windsurfing you need talent, but you dont need to be an individualist. The state also disapproved of the close contacts maintained between windsurfers in East and West Germany. After a secret meeting between windsurfers from either side of the border at the Mggelsee, the organizers were summoned to the Berlin Stasi office and interrogated. The SED and sports leaders also felt threatened by attempts in the early 1980s to set up commercial surfing training facilities in Berlin, Potsdam and Schwerin. This politically suspect enthusiasm for surfing reached even into the families of the Party elite; Karl Schnitzler, a nephew of the notorious chief ideologist of television, Karl Eduard von Schnitzler, opened his own surfing school in the Wismar-Land region. The Party refused to tolerate these developments, and Manfred Ewald intervened personally.34 The training centre was soon forced to close down, and Schnitzler, who had suffered from an arson attack to the centre, resorted to fleeing the country. A further serious limitation for windsurfers was that they were only allowed access to the sea through neighbouring Poland. Competitions were at first allowed on the Baltic, but once the security forces had worked out that windsurfers could easily sail under their radar,35 they were only permitted on inland waters. The Rennsteiglauf was able to fit in relatively easily with the political and sporting structures of the GDR, but windsurfers met greater obstacles, in many cases politically motivated: they were not allowed an independent association, their private training facilities were closed down, and they had to practise their sport within strict geographical limits. Their story also pinpoints the ideological nerve that they touched within the SED: ordinary sport within the GRD was never going to be acceptable if it encouraged contact with West Germany. The truth was that those taking part in Trendsport activities were in constant contact with the West, following the latest Western trends, watching Western television, reading magazines, and through their joint sporting activities, but the regime required them to deny that this was the case, and to maintain the fiction that they practised an original East German form of Stehbrettsegeln. The feral GDR windsurfers were therefore sailing away not only from the grip of the DTSB, but also from the schizophrenia demanded of them by the regime. Even greater difficulties were placed in the way of enthusiasts for another Trendsport: karate, the martial art from the Far East, which was growing in popularity. It was pioneered in the GDR at the start of the 1970s by members of a group of Kaskadeure36 in East Berlin. Due to their high reputation doing stunts for DEFA (Deutsche Film AG, the official GDR film production company), they were able to use public facilities for karate training sessions, even though the sport was not officially approved; they presented their exercises as training in judo and gymnastics. Through the influence of the US series Kung Fu, broadcast in the mid-1970s on West German television, and of cowboy-and-Indian films made in the GDR and featuring the Kaskadeure, many people were soon familiar with the concept of karate, and DTSB local offices were receiving ever more enquiries about where to find training. Sports leaders reacted with harshness, and in November
34 Ewald to Erbach, 29 Sept. 1986, betr. Surfschule Schnitzler. BAB DR 5/1638. 35 Ren Wiese and Ronald Huster, Brettsegeln in der DDR, in Hans Joachim Teichler (ed.), Sport in der DDR. Eigensinn,

Konflikte, Trends. Kln 2003, pp. 425500.

36 In an effort to combat the invasion of English words, a stuntman was called a Kaskadeur in East Germany.

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1979 the DTSB directorate reached the so-called karate decision. Karate was declared to be inadmissible, and no DTSB members were permitted to practise it. This fashionable trend was said to be the result of ideological influence working in favour of capitalism, so it was necessary to stop the practice of karate and encourage all those engaged in it to switch to judo or some other sport.37 This uncompromising rejection by the sports authorities was due, first, to the fact that enthusiasm for the sport had arisen through the Western media, and second, to the fear that promising judo talent would be diverted into the new sport. In spite of the DTSBs refusal to take any interest, karate gained new enthusiasts during the 1980s. Dedicated practitioners in a number of districts set up illegal training groups,38 but there was a constant fear that the state authorities would intervene and take repressive measures. One of those most committed to karate was Wolfgang Siewert, who lived in Seebad Ahlbeck and was a judo section leader in BSG Empor Ahlbeck, the local sports association. Between 18 and 20 October 1985 he organized the first national training course for 150 karate practitioners from seventy DDR localities. A second large-scale training course in Wolgast, however, was forbidden at short notice by the local police authorities, and the organizers were arrested. Siewert was threatened with expulsion from the DTSB, and in the end he was let off with a severe reprimand. Karate was forbidden by the state as a popular sport. It was, however, incorporated into the training for hand-to-hand combat for the GDR armed security forces, and was compulsory in the training of uniformed officers of the security services. Yet, any attempts by karate enthusiasts to arrange friendly sporting encounters with individual Volksarmee units were vigorously blocked. The hand-to-hand combat trainer in the Ernst Thlmann Officer Training College wrote in November 1985 to Wolfgang Siewert:
We are forbidden to share the details of our training with the general public, and have no intention of encouraging the introduction of karate (in any of its forms) into the socialist sports movement We are not able to assume any prior knowledge of karate, since it does not officially exist in our republic.39

Characteristically for the GDR, karate enthusiasts resorted to petitions to seek to improve the position. The leaders of the informal local groups engaged in a concerted campaign to ensure that as many written requests were sent to the local authorities, at local, area and regional level.
We used subterfuge, so that it didnt appear that it always came from the same place, but from four, five or six places. We asked family and friends to address petitions and enquiries to the state authorities. For example, wed say to them Say that youve heard that people are doing karate, and youd like to know where; or, youve heard there is a karate training course running, and can you join, and how is the course organized We used what you might call the pin-prick tactic.40

At the same time requests were sent directly to the SED leadership, asking them finally to grant official permission for karate, and to allow the setting up of an umbrella organization. On 27 July 1987 a petition for the creation of a sports organization was drawn up to send to Erich Honecker, the Chairman of the Council of State of the GDR.
37 SAPMO DY 12/9254, Bdl. 273. 38 In November 1988 there were altogether 2285 individuals practising karate in a total of 101 such regional groups. 39 Letter from the combat trainer at the time, a Major in the Nationale Volksarmee, 28 Nov. 1985. Kurt Repmann papers:

Quoting: Kurt Repmann: Die konfliktreiche Entwicklung des Karatesports in der DDR, in Teichler, Sport in der DDR, pp. 501532, here p. 518. 40 Interview by Kurt Repman with Kaskadeur Axel Dziersk, Oct. 1999. in ibid, p. 520.

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This carried a subtle warning from those practising karate, who had so far existed in a state of semi-legality, that if this were refused then the state would lose any chance of having control of the sport: It might not be comfortable to know that there were 600 owners of illegal weapons [karate could also be used as a weapon] in the GDR, and that you only know the identity of a tenth of them was the thinly-veiled threat.41 The government, however, stood firm, saying that not every passing fashion could be allowed to lead to an independent, state-sanctioned organization. The final refusal was delivered to a delegation of karate enthusiasts when they had a personal meeting in East Berlin on 28 January 1988 with two representatives of the SED Central Committee. They were warned that the karate groups that you and your colleagues run no longer operate within the confines of legality, and you can be held responsible for this. All such activities are to cease, and they are henceforth forbidden.42 So, unlike with windsurfing, from then until the fall of the GDR those practising karate could only do so illegally. The failure of karate to establish itself shows very clearly how far participation in the dictatorship was permitted: even the most cleverly thought-out petition campaign or the bravest plea could simply be thrown out of court if the Partys final word was No. The arrests in Wolgast illustrate a further factor hindering participation: those who ventured beyond the authorities comfort zone, even if their activities were for a while tolerated, could suddenly find that an arbitrary Damocless sword had fallen, and that they were punished. This was also the experience of triathletes, who had been attempting since 1983 to gain official permission to practise their Trendsport in the GDR. The athletes themselves, in local competitions, had been describing their sport as Ausdauer-Dreikampf, in order to stay out of the Partys line of fire. Every event, however, was plagued by uncertainty: competitions in the Leipzig area were relatively freely tolerated, but in 1984 a planned Sachsentriathlon was forbidden even as the competitors were taking position on the starting line, and the organizers were arrested.43 Participants in Trendsport, even though they did nothing which was per se in opposition to the SED regime, found that they were in the wrong, due to the ignorance and repressive instincts of the sports authorities. This experiencebecoming unintentionally criminalizedwas one that was shared by large numbers of football fans.

Fan Culture: Surveillance and Repression

With the introduction of the Bundesliga, an independent youth fan culture had developed in the Federal Republic, and in the second half of the 1970s they took over the football grounds. A parallel movement developed in the GDR, and the classic fan insignia became a necessary part of every football supporters outfit. Uncontrolled fan clubs soon developed, and the sports department of the Central Committee

41 Complaint by Hilmar Ortleb to Erich Honecker, Chairman of the Council of State of the DDR, 28 July 1987. 42 Filenote

on a SED Central Committee discussion on 28 Jan. 1988 in response to a complaint from Comrade Hilmar Ortleb (29 Dec. 1987) to Comrade Egon Krenz, SAPMO DY 30 IV 2/2.039/163. 43 In 1983 the first such event, in Rostock, attracted 40 participants; in 1989 there were around 3000 participants, taking part in a total of 40 competitions: Giselher Spitzer, Fuball und Triathlon. Sportentwicklung in der DDR (Aachen, 2004), p. 102.

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estimated that there were at least fifty clubs per district. From the start, both the Party and the sports leadership viewed with alarm the lively behaviour of the fans in the football grounds, which was very different from the singing of Party songs and the handclapping of GDR sports and gymnastics events.44 The state leaders distrusted both the community spirit among the fans and the consequent euphoria. The principal difficulty for the authorities was that these groups were not state-registered, as no application had been made for state recognition according to the prescribed protocol of 6 November 1975 which regulated the setting up and activities of associations. According to this protocol, associations could only be recognized as legal if their character and their aims were in accordance with the basic tenets of a socialist society. In practice, this protocol was principally used to hinder the existence or the activities of organizations representing political opposition. However, football fans also fell foul of this politically repressive SED law. The spontaneous way in which the football supporters behaved was perceived as unpredictable, and it was feared that further uncontrolled developments in the behaviour of fan clubs could not be discounted, and that this would provide a rallying point for politically indifferent or oppositional elements.45 This was the recommendation of the security department of the Central Committee. The football players were ordered to collaborate with the defence and security authorities in order to draw up an overview of the fan-club scene, and establish which clubs they wanted to work with. The remainder were to be prohibited. The Party also wished to establish a standard procedure for admission to membership of the clubs, and ordered that the name and any equipment and flags used were to reflect closely the character of the individual club. One club which failed to meet these requirements, for example, was the fan-club of the Berlin club BFC Dynamo: fans had chosen the name Bobbys which was, they explained in a sly taunt, with reference to our Bullenverein,46 and in homage to the cool motherland of football and punk rock.47 The central committee of Freie Deutsche Jugend, much concerned, suggested that new songs and support chants should be written that supported sporting endeavour and were deliberately different from the often ugly texts of the songs the fans sang.48 An SED Central Committee working paper reflected on the challenge of effecting such a change in popular behaviour: New songs and texts for football would be a good idea. Now, who is going to write them, and who will disseminate them among the football fans?49 During the 1980s the sports leadership kept a close eye on all aspects of the football fan world. The punk fan club Sinnlos, the Christian club St Antonius Schneweide, and a fan club in the Knigs Wusterhausen School for the Blindthese

44 Molly Wilkinson has analysed participation in gymnastics events in her new study: Molly Wilkinson Johnson, Training

Socialist Citizens (Leiden and Boston, 2008), pp. 135164. Jutta Braun, Sportfreunde oder Staatsfeinde?, Deutschlandarchiv 3 (2004), pp. 440447. 45 ZK-Abteilung Sport, 08 May 1984. Standpunkt zu einigen Fragen der weiteren Arbeit mit Fan-Clubs im Fuball. SAPMO DY 30 IV 2/2.039/251, Bl. 41. 46 Bulle is a German slang word for policeman: the fans meant that the BFC dynamo was run by the ministry of state security. 47 Andreas Glser, Der BFC war schuld am Mauerbau. Ein stolzer Sohn des Proletariats erzhlt (Berlin, 2002), p. 43. 48 Standpunkt des Zentralrats der FDJ zur Erhhung von Ordnung und Sicherheit bei Oberligafuballspielen, o.D., Bl. 33. SAPMO DY 30 IV 2/2.039/251, Bl. 33. 49 Zum Standpunkt des Zentralrats, o.D. SAPMO DY 30 IV 2/2.039/251, Bl. 32.

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were all considered to be completely illegal, and were kept under surveillance by the state security forces.50 In addition to belonging to such fan clubs, many GDR football fans travelled to matches where teams from the Federal Republic were playing, especially in Czechoslovakia. According to the Leipzig Institute for Youth Research, the Bundesliga clubs which set the standard enjoyed particular popularity among the youth of the GDR.51 Whereas the GDR performed considerably better than the Federal Republic in the Olympics, in football, the most popular sport, the opposite was true. As the GDR teams fell behind in international football, GDR fans allowed their eyes to wander with admiration to the West German teams. In terms of the SEDs strongly demarcating ideology, West Germany was on a par with the devil in medieval world,52 and the Party reacted to such sporting preferences with vehement repressive measures. A report to the Politbro gives an indication of the extent of surveillance of GDR citizens who travelled to Warsaw to watch an international football match between Poland and West Germany on 10 October 1971. Homemade banners with messages such as Chemnitz greets the German national team and Kaiser Franz, and the high number of GDR citizens who had travelled to Poland on a wide variety of pretextsofficially 1303 spectators, from all districts of the GDRprovoked a country-wide inspection, and some unpleasant reprisals, especially for Party members found to be involved.53 But in spite of such intimidation, large numbers of GDR fans continued to show their support for West German football. Whenever they could, they laid siege to the West German team buses and begged for autographs. The authorities came down particularly harshly on the occasion of a match in Ostrava between Banik Ostrava and FC Bayern Mnchen. Some fans had banners confiscated on their way to the match, and were prevented from continuing to the match, and six further banners were later spotted at the football ground. The banners carried completely harmless messages to FC Bayern and its team from GDR fans.54 Strong-arm tactics did not succeed, however, in preventing further messages of support for West German players from East German football fans. The behaviour of the fans throughout the 1970s and 1980s arose overwhelmingly out of sporting rather than political motivations, and it demonstrates a clear deficiency in the ideological hold of the SED regime. Although the vast majority of the fans concerned were of a generation which had grown up in the GDR and with its values, yet for them the separation from West Germany was not internalized as normal.55 Quite the contrary: they demonstrated complete openness towards the Other Germany, which according to the SED scale of values was the source of all evil. The football fans viewed their support of Bundesliga
50 Abt. XX/2, 6.7.1982, Analyse zum Stand der Bearbeitung des negativen Anhanges des 1. FC Union Berlin/Spielserie

81/82Tendenzen/Schwerpunkte. BStU ASt. Berlin, Abt. XX, A 854. none of the international teams concerned were from a socialist country: ZIJ-Expertise Jugendliche FuballfansStruktur und Einstellungen, Mai 1984. 52 Stefan Wolle, Der Traum vom Westen. Wahrnehmungen der bundesdeutschen Gesellschaft in der DDR, in Konrad Jarausch and Martin Sabrow (eds), Wege in den Untergang (Gttingen, 1999), pp. 196ff. 53 The six-page report is documented in Teichler, Sportbeschlsse, pp. 609ff. 54 Zentraler Operativstab, Zusammenfassende Darstellung zur Problematik der Ausschreitungen bei Fuballspielen im In- und Ausland, insbesondere fr den Zeitraum von 1978 bis 1981, Juni 1981. BStU, ZA, HA XXII 18438. 55 See Fulbrooks initial reflections on the relationship between generation and normalization in the GDR, in Peoples State, p. 8.
51 However,

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football as a completely normal, everyday activity. It was the SED and its apparatus of repression that would have the sports enthusiasts believe that their activities were deviant or abnormal, and that they were a danger to the state.

Conclusion
Even the word fun does not sound much like the GDR.56 The historian Kai Reinhart thus somewhat humorously summarized the problems encountered by fashionable sports as they sought to gain ground in the GDR, and in fact he neatly hits on the principal characteristic of sports in the GDR. Sport in the second German state was always bowed down by the weight of political meaning and of the socialist project. Sport is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, Erich Honecker announced in 1948 at the inaugural meeting of the Deutscher Sportausschu, the German sports committee, and this was to remain true for the duration of the GDR. Elite sports were expected initially to promote the recognition of the GDR as a state, and later to beat West Germany in the Olympic medals race. And indeed throughout the existence of the GDR, these elite sports did succeed in adorning East German socialism with the reflected glory of countless gold medals. The events of the autumn of 1989, however, made it clear that these elite sports were indeed merely bling, and did not reflect the true interest of the German people. Elite sports, so highly prized, and always promoted beyond their due to the detriment of other sports, were not able at the height of the Wende events in 1989 to perform their intended function, namely to promote both within and outside the state the reputation of the SED regime. When in October and November 1989 the streets of East Germany rang to the calls for the freedom of speech, the right to vote, and the right to peaceful assembly, SED officials did not dare counter such basic claims by pointing out that the GDR had done well in gaining gold medals. In the final days of the SED regime the success of the GDR elite sports programme counted for nothing. Even popular sport had constantly been burdened with political significance by the SED, boldly symbolized in the motto printed on the sports badges: Equipped for work and for the defence of the homeland. Sport was not to be an individual or privately-run institution, but an organized, collective activity, an expression of political commitment to both personal and social duty.57 For the majority, though, sport suffered from the preferential treatment granted to elite sports. The development of new kinds of sporting activity was also hindered because of the primacy of Olympic sports. Enthusiasts for Trendsport activities had to beg for their sports to be recognized and permitteda direct consequence of the SEDs dictatorial sports monopoly. The dogged determination with which officials resisted the various innovations can only be explained by taking into account the high level of political instrumentalization: the distinction between Sport 1 and Sport 2, once established, was not to be tampered with or weakened in any way. And since the officials were unable to conceive of sport as being practised simply for fun, they could not see the need to grant permission for fanciful capitalist fashions. From the

56 Mit dem Germina Speeder durch Ost-Berlin. Funsport in der DDR, Der Spiegel (30 Dec. 2005). 57 Jochen

Hinsching, Betriebssport in der DDR, in Gertrud Pfister (ed.), Zwischen Arbeitnehmerinteressen und Unternehmenspolitik. Zur Geschichte des Betriebssports in Deutschland (St. Augustin, 1999) pp. 104120.

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point of view of the participatory dictatorship, the history of Trendsport shows us two important strands of life in the GDR. It reveals the achievements of those involvedfor example the organizers of the Rennsteiglaufwho, to quote Fulbrook, were active participants in making themselves and their own history,58 through working collaboratively within the constraints laid down by the Party. The case of some other Trendsport activities hints at the truth about the share that GDR citizens actually had in the dictatorships decision-making: enthusiasts were forced to use semi-legal procedures, mixed in with a good share of camouflage, tricks, and wheeling and dealing, in order to gain the approval of the authorities. Anyone familiar with everyday life in the GDR knows that this applied to many other areas of life, as well as sport. It remains to be seen whether it was ever true that this stressful and demeaning way of life ever seemed normal to GDR citizens. The fault-lines of conflict around popular sports that have been identified in this article were indications of the anger of the population, and these were explicitly listed in a catalogue of complaints drawn up shortly before the fall of the SED regime by the citizens rights movement:
The facts are that 1. opportunities for sports available to GDR citizens are woefully short of the standards of other industrial developed nations; 2. private initiatives to make good this deficiency have been forbidden (for example, the granting of permission for private fitness centres); 3. the recognition granted to elite sports put an end to serious provision for popular sports; 4. so-called non-Olympic sports or sports yielding few medals such as body-building, triathlon, oriental martial arts, hockey, basketball, tennis and so on have at best been suffered to exist; and 5. the quality and quantity of sports clothing, equipment and grounds available is far short of what is required in order to satisfy the needs of the population.59

During the 1970s and 1980s the SED was on the one hand confronted by the increasing demands of popular sports, demands it found difficult to meet, and by the thirst for new experiences of Trendsport practitioners; on the other hand, the growth of the football fan phenomenon presented a further challenge to the controlling instincts of the Party. These lines of conflict were brought to crisis point by the schizophrenic nature of the relationship between the GDR and West Germany. Those who practised popular sports, or followed them as fans, were constantly at the mercy of, and highly sensitive to, cultural influences from the West in general, and the Federal Republic in particular. And yet they were required to turn their backs on all of these, whether through the pedantic renaming of skateboarders as Rollbrettfahrer or through the brutal tearing down of banners with slogans proclaiming support of Germans by Germans. This schizophrenia was not limited to the world of sport, but marked a whole society which was not allowed to travel to the West, and yet settled down comfortably every evening to watch Western television, and used the Deutschmark as a strong secondary currency within the GDR. There was a constant pressure at one and the same time both to recognize and to repress the evident reality that the Federal Republic was an ever-present factor in everyday life in the GDR, and this may well have been the strongest reason why it is difficult to say of the GDR that life was completely normal.

58 Fulbrook, Peoples State, p. 296. 59 Neues Forum Leipzig (4 Dec. 1989), as in fn. 1.

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Abstract
In the light of Mary Fulbrooks study of everyday life in the GDR, this article discusses the issues faced in everyday sport under real Socialism. From the 1970s onwards, mushrooming trendy sports, such as windsurfing and karate, came up against the narrow-minded and repressive policies of the SED, which were guided by the belief that sport should exist only to serve the Socialist project. The state concentrated its provision exclusively on Olympic sports. Sports considered by the SED to be politically unnecessary were allowed to decay or were banned. In a few cases, however, such as the grass-roots initiative of the Rennsteiglauf in Thringen, social impetus and state controls together produced a workable symbiosis. The football fan culture exposed a gaping hole in the Partys control mechanism. Fans in the GDR were drawn to the successful West German Bundesliga, and countless East German spectators regularly crowded into Eastern European football grounds visited by West German teams. The SED regime took strenuous measures against what they saw as politically objectionable, reckoning fans were in grave danger from keeping company and making common cause with the Other Germany. The issue of the football fan culture revealed that the younger generation, who had grown up within the GDR, had failed to internalize the postulated animosity toward West Germany. This article aims to show that the issues surrounding sport contributed to the ideological schizophrenia which in the end so discredited the regime in the eyes of its citizens that in 1989 they fled in their thousands an Alltag that had become unbearable. Keywords: Trendsport, football, fan culture, dictatorship, Ministry of State Security, GDR
Translated by Sarah Patey

University of Potsdam jbraun@rz.uni-potsdam.de

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