Silence during the National Anthem Why Sports are Still Something Else in East Germany

Thank you very much for coming and thank you also, for inviting me to come all the way to Montreal. This has been one of my furthest journeys abroad. Just one other took me even further – to a new country which used to be my homeland and then disappeared: from the GDR to Germany. I would like to tell you about this journey and to my transition from an East German Sports fan to a German Sports spectator. I first saw the wall when I was a small child. It ran behind my parents’ allotment garden in the north of East Berlin and we could see the newly-built housing blocks of West Berlin rising above it – strangely enough though, they didn’t appear in my school atlas. It only showed a grey spot where West Berlin was supposed to be. Nonetheless, people in those houses over there would sometimes open a window or watch us gardening or barbecuing. For us those people didn’t exist, they weren’t allowed to exist. The family garden was a niche where we sought refuge from the State and could dream of the West – free and undisturbed. Only, the peculiar thing was that our family retreat was right next to the most rigorous of all the borders which the State had erected for us. Still, we never heard a gunshot in our garden … just the watchdogs barking. My family permanently expected the unexpected. Every day we saw soldiers in uniform, shotguns at the ready, staring coldly. They sat in converted and camouflage-painted Trabant cars patrolling the border. Once they brought my sister home (in their camouflage painted Trabi). She had dug up an alarm wire with her toy spade. That put an end to her playing at the Wall, although the sand there was finer than at the seaside. It took quite some years before I understood. They didn’t want plants to grow at a wall where six hundred to a thousand people had lost their lives. As a school boy I photographed the wall. When I went to collect the photos, the shop had developed all of them except for the pictures of the border. Someone had picked them out; but who? Already at this young age I realised that I should forget about the Wall and that I mustn’t talk about it either. In Pankow, planes crossed the sky above our heads on their way to the West Berlin airport, Tegel. Strictly speaking, these planes were nonexistent for us. But we always gazed longingly after them. I wanted to become a sports reporter after my parents had taken pains to talk me out of my other career aspiration: to be Erich Honecker. I longed to travel around the world and report on the truth. That this was impossible for a political journalist of the GDR, I had already realized when I got into trouble with my school magazine. I had called it “Brennpunkt”. My school director reacted by asking me: “How could you call it Brennpunkt?” Don’t you know there is a TV show in West German TV called “Brennpunkt”? “Of course not”, I lied. “You know, we never watch West German TV at home.” The director couldn’t say anything. I had learned to speak double-tongued already as a child. Everyone in the GDR knew how to. But of course, I didn’t want it to be that way in my professional life as a journalist. So, at the time I thought: Better choose the sports’ world. When the GDR national team lost 1:2, no one could claim it had won 2:1. …