The winter that changed East German football forever
Reform, realpolitik and Cold War rivalry: Why almost every major club from the former GDR celebrated its 60th anniversary in the last few weeks.
Temperatures were below freezing in south-east Berlin last Tuesday, and the floodlights were very much off in the Alte Försterei. The next matchday was four days away, and the ground staff were still laying new turf after weeks of ice and snow. Yet the place was buzzing.
Around 4000 Union fans had braved the cold to attend the club’s 60th anniversary celebrations. In a 30-metre high, glowing red circus tent in the stadium car park, they were treated to a three-hour programme of music, speeches and nostalgia. Those who stuck it out until the end, when the wind chill had dropped to almost minus double figures, were rewarded with free beer.
Union have plenty to celebrate. Two years on from their Champions League adventure, the one-time minnows are still riding a wave of euphoria as one of the fastest-growing clubs in the country. They are now in their seventh successive top-flight season, during which time both their membership and their annual revenues have quadrupled.
They were not the only ones making merry, however. On the same night, 200 kilometres away, 1. FC Lokomotive Leipzig were also marking their 60th in Leipzig’s grand, 19th century train station. Five days earlier, fans of BFC Dynamo and Chemnitzer FC had done the same with midnight displays of fireworks and flares, while the weeks before had seen similar festivites at Rot-Weiß Erfurt, 1. FC Magdeburg and Hansa Rostock. Over the past month, a total of ten clubs from the former GDR have all - in one way or another - turned 60.
This is no coincidence. All of these ten clubs were founded as part of a radical, top-down reform of GDR football in the winter 1965/66. Sparked by the Cold War rivalry between the capitalist West and the communist East, it was a reform which has continued to shape the East German game long after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In 1965, the GDR was not yet two decades old and still struggling to establish itself on the global stage. It would be another seven years before its statehood was officially (though not fully) recognised by the West, allowing it to join the United Nations. It had built the Berlin Wall just four years previously, effectively imprisoning its own citizens in order to avoid total economic and demographic collapse. Against that backdrop, sport was a way of building legitimacy. It had always been - and would remain - one of the regime’s favourite soft-power instruments.
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Yet in football at least, the GDR was still some way off its dream of becoming a major European power. The country had not qualified for a single World Cup since joining FIFA in 1952, and had never got past the last-16 of the new European Championship. It had enjoyed more success at the Olympics, though even that came with a caveat. Until 1964, the two Germanies competed under the same flag at the Olympics, with the football teams disputing an internal play-off to decide which team would be sent to the Games. When a de facto GDR side won bronze in Tokyo, they did so as “The United Team of Germany”. In club football, meanwhile, West Germany was already beginning to pull ahead with the founding of the Bundesliga and professionalisation in 1963. The East, whose clubs had made next to no impression in the emerging European club competitions, was in danger of losing ground.
So, the state embarked on a root-and-branch reform of the football infrastructure. At the heart of it was the founding of ten new Fußballclubs or “FCs” across the various regions of East Germany. These clubs were conceived as a new elite, designed to dominate the domestic game and - more importantly - act as regional development centres to feed the national teams with a steady stream of talent.
Though by no means the first reform of its kind, it was by far the most radical. Whereas previously, all elite football teams had been folded into wider, multi-sport clubs and associations, now the FCs would act as independent entities, directly under the national football and sport authorities. That, in effect, meant a centralisation of political power. Even clubs like Union, whose fans would later be romanticised as football “dissidents”, were now more directly under party control.
“The national sports association DTSB was, like all mass organisations, an extended arm of the party,” said Union’s club chronicler Gerald Karpa in an interview with Der Tagesspiegel. “From 1966 to 1990, Union was therefore an active element of the political system.”
However tied up it was with party ideology, though, the football reform was also an act of cold-blooded Realpolitik: a tacit admission that if the East was going to keep up with its western rivals, it would have to follow their playbook.
When the Allies divided Germany into zones of occupation in 1945, they had initially banned all sports clubs across the country. In the West, the old clubs were soon reintroduced, whereas in the East, the authorities set about creating an entirely new sporting culture along communist lines. “Clubs” with paying members were considered bourgeois, and replaced instead with “workers’ sports associations” (BSGs), which were tied to the new state-owned enterprises of the centralised economy. Players would, in theory, be playing for their workplace and their team would be named accordingly: Chemie for the chemical plants, Lokomotive for the railways, Dynamo for the police.
That changed with the founding of the new FCs. Even if the new clubs remained tied to their state enterprises, they now had much more in common with their counterparts in the capitalist West. While some like Lok Leipzig and BFC Dynamo kept their socialist names, others like Union Berlin and Carl Zeiss Jena were allowed to revive the “bourgeois” monikers of their pre-war past. Most notably of all, ordinary fans were now allowed to become fee-paying members, regardless of whether they had any working ties to the club.
“To reintroduce that bourgeois structure of clubs with passive membership was politically a huge step back,” said Union chronicler Karpa.
But it worked. Within ten years, the reform was already beginning to show results. In the 1970s, the GDR football team won medals at three successive Olympic Games, claiming bronze at Munich 1972, gold at Montreal 1976 and silver at Moscow 1980. In May 1974, 1. FC Magdeburg became the first East German team to win a European trophy, beating AC Milan 2-0 in the final of the Cup Winners’ Cup. The greatest success came a few months later when the national team, having finally qualified for their first World Cup, celebrated a stunning 1-0 win over “class enemies” West Germany in Hamburg.
“(Without the FCs), we wouldn’t have been able to be competitive,” former Union and Hansa Rostock coach Heinz Werner told kicker magazine earlier this month. “That brought East German football to another level”.
Success on the international stage may not have lasted. No other club team ever matched Magdeburg’s success in Europe and the reluctance to play Western teams ultimately weakened the national side in the 1980s, despite the emergence of players like Matthias Sammer and Ulf Kirsten. Yet domestically, at least, the legacy of 1965/66 endured.
From the reform of that winter onwards, the FCs dominated GDR football almost entirely. Magdeburg won three league titles and three cups in the 1970s. BFC Dynamo, the pet project of Stasi chief Erich Mielke, enjoyed structural advantages which allowed them to win ten league titles in a row between 1979 and 1988. Only three FCs - Hansa, Union and Vorwärts - were ever relegated to the second division. Between 1967 and 1991, only two clubs from outside their ranks managed to win a major trophy: surprise cup winners Sachsenring Zwickau and the multiple title winners Dynamo Dresden, who were effectively an FC in all but name.
In some ways, the fall of the Wall and the end of the GDR broke that dynamic. Unable to manage the transition to capitalism, many of the powerful FCs were plunged into crisis in the 1990s and 2000s. While smaller East German clubs like Energie Cottbus and Erzgebirge Aue (formerly Wismut Aue) established themselves in professional football, the likes of BFC, Lok, Jena and Erfurt have wallowed for years in the fourth-tier regional league.
The cultural clout of the FCs, however, is untouchable. Some, like BFC and Lok, briefly changed their identities after reunification in an attempt to shake associations with the old communist regime. Yet they soon changed back, encouraged by supporters who identified far more strongly with the socialist-era names. In a football culture obsessed with hazy ideas of “tradition”, there is still plenty of nostalgia for the grand old clubs of the 1970s and 1980s.
The 60th anniversary celebrations were yet another reminder that these clubs are sleeping giants. Always intended to be an elite, they still make up the vast majority of professional or semi-professional clubs in eastern Germany. And as Union and Magdeburg have shown in recent years, even a little success can suddenly unleash the potential of a vast, dormant regional fanbase. Six decades later, the landscape of East German football is still shaped by the winter of 1965/66 and the cultural arms race of the Cold War.
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