by Herbie Sykes
NEUES DEUTSCHLAND
ORGAN DES ZENTRALKOMITEES DER SOZIALISTISCHEN EINHEITSPARTEI DEUTSCHLANDS
The German Democratic Republic Cycling Federation has received the following letter:
Dear friends!
When first we met with sporting people from the GDR, we had so many questions from our sports fans that they didn’t know which one to answer first. However, they went to great lengths to explain about life in the GDR, and that of an athlete in particular. We want to be honest: at first we were very sceptical. We could hardly believe the care your government takes of its athletes. The difference between your ways and those of the FRG couldn’t be bigger.
Again and again, when we got together with athletes from the GDR we were full of questions, and again and again we received the same answer: ‘Yes, really, we have no worries. We get all our equipment from our BSG, they give us every conceivable opportunity to train, and take care of our professional development. If we want we can even study at our universities and colleges free from all material worries.’
However, when we see how many are unemployed in the FRG, and when we note that our government’s only interest in sport is to develop us for their army, then we understand in which part of Germany sport has a future. Neither of us want to be soldiers in a new fascist army, but to develop our sporting skills. We don’t want to die in another war, but to create a happy and peaceful future. That’s why we ask to live and work in the GDR, and that you accept us as members of the democratic sports movement.
Emil Reinecke & Wolfgang Grupe
Reprinted from ‘Reinecke and Grupe come to the GDR’, 8 February 1955
EMIL
The president of the GDR Cycling Federation, Werner Scharch, asked me whether I was interested in taking part in a Peace Race training camp. They invited me and two other West German riders, Wolfgang Grupe and Hennes Junkermann, to a cross-country skiing training camp in Thüringen. I was asked whether I wanted to ride the Peace Race for the GDR, and naturally I was!
I suppose that they were looking for successful riders who had already ridden for the national team and had international experience; riders they could count on to support their team. It was an easy decision for me to make. In the west I had no professional contract and no offers. I didn’t earn enough, couldn’t live on the prize money and had to work all day. In the GDR I had no financial worries and far better training opportunities.
The FRG federation wasn’t happy about it, but I was young and fearless. I wanted to succeed and to try to take advantage of my opportunity.
Before I went I made it clear to them that I wasn’t going to be involved in politics, so I didn’t have to take part in any special training or suchlike. They suggested that I join the SED, but I refused and they accepted that.14
NEUES DEUTSCHLAND
ORGAN DES ZENTRALKOMITEES DER SOZIALISTISCHEN EINHEITSPARTEI DEUTSCHLANDS
It’s just like a scene from a long-forgotten film, where bells ring, foaming breakers race across the deck of a ship shaken by the storm, and hoarse throats call ‘Man overboard!’ […]
First, the facts: a bricklayer and a labourer, both of whom previously lived in the FRG, had been unemployed for a year and a day. This may be commonplace in the FRG, but Wolfgang Grupe and Emil Reinecke – enthusiastic and talented cyclists both – were disillusioned with the situation. The idea of years spent unemployed is as anachronistic as the plagues of the Middle Ages.
They therefore took a good look at the GDR, and carefully studied the facilities for the promotion and development of sport. These include the most modern sports university in Europe, and they learned that at DHfK, the new German College for Physical Culture and Sports, the students receive a satisfactory scholarship. Since both are good Germans, they saw nothing untoward in saying goodbye to the FRG and coming over to settle in the GDR, as have hundreds before them. […]
But those screaming themselves hoarse with ‘Man overboard!’ will ultimately come to the realisation that the problem is greater than the curses of sailors. A man overboard is painful, but a leaky, sinking ship is far more dangerous.
Reprinted from ‘Man overboard!’, 12 February 1955
EMIL
We were supposed to complete studies at DHfK15 in Leipzig, but I never attended a single lecture. When we first arrived there was a reception for us there; all very ostentatious with speeches and gifts. There was a five-year study plan, but due to the volume of training there was no time for lectures.
The conditions were perfect. There was comprehensive medical care and physiotherapy, and a perfectly developed training plan. We concentrated exclusively on cycling, and we had excellent equipment.16
DIETER
The object of the exercise was to prove that our system was better than theirs.
DHfK was the only dedicated sports university in the world at the time. It was in Leipzig, and the whole purpose was to showcase GDR excellence in sport. That meant winning world and European championships and Olympic medals, so it hand-picked the most talented athletes from all over the country. If they fitted the model and they were ideologically sound they were enrolled there and lived on the campus. In a traditional university you’d need three or four years to complete a sports doctorate, but they would be there for up to twelve. That more or less equated to the duration of an athlete’s career, because they wanted to keep them in the system for as long as they delivered results.
Ostensibly they were studying sports science, physiology and suchlike, but in reality their job was to deliver results. In cycling that meant winning at the Peace Race and world championships. They were the events the public was interested in, and everything was engineered around them.
The DHfK athletes were portrayed as shining examples of the sports programme. When they won it proved that socialism was working, so they were treated extremely well compared to the rest. They were given everything they needed to succeed, and those who won big events got huge bursaries compared to normal students. It therefore followed that they would be present at all the big championships, because that was the premise on which it had been created in the first place.
EMIL
I couldn’t tell you about daily life in the GDR. We were almost always in training camp, and had very little contact with normal people. We trained and we were on the road. I never met a family, but I know that a normal worker was earning maybe 300–400 marks a month. We got 1,000, with free board and lodging, and in addition to that there were the bonuses. I was able to send my parents 400 Deutschmarks a month.17
NEUES DEUTSCHLAND
ORGAN DES ZENTRALKOMITEES DER SOZIALISTISCHEN EINHEITSPARTEI DEUTSCHLANDS
In the early morning hours of Thursday, this year’s Peace Race Team flew from the German capital to Bucharest, to complete one final stage race in preparation. On Wednesday evening Manfred Ewald, the president of the State Committee for Physical Culture and Sports, had taken the opportunity to say goodbye at the airport Hotel Schönefeld, and to wish them all the best.
How’s the team looking?
Since our team won’t be back on German soil until 7 May, cycling fans are asking themselves, ‘How are we likely to do after last season’s disappointing performance?’ It’s a question, it transpires, which isn’t so easy to answer. Of the sextet from the seventh Peace Race, only the duo of Schur and Funda remain, and the latter’s form is under close scrutiny following his surprising abandon last Sunday.
The ranks of the democratic sporting movement are swollen by Grupe and Reinecke, two whizz-kids who have already demonstrated their strength in West Germany. They have the requisite international experience for the Peace Race, the world’s most demanding and important stage race. Bernhard Trefflich and Lothar Meister – two longstanding Peace Race participants – were also invited into the circle of candidates for the GDR team. However, both rejected the chance to participate, with flimsy justifications.
The presidium of the Wismut cycling section requested an explanation fo
r this unusual step, but only months later did they receive an answer. Now, just a few weeks before the Peace Race, the two of them are ready to take up systematic training. Following the bad training experiences of previous years, this offer could only be rejected. […]
Reprinted from ‘The GDR Peace Race riders set off yesterday’, 22 April 1955
DIETER
Each year there was a big build-up to the Peace Race, and they used to run miniature versions for kids up and down the country. So on 1 May 1955 I entered my first event, a fifteen-kilometre scratch event for boys aged fourteen to eighteen. To be honest I shouldn’t have been riding because I was still six weeks short of my birthday. I only had the touring bike I’d been given for my birthday two years previously, but they let me ride anyway. And I won.
DIETER
The following weekend the race started, and they left out Bernhard Trefflich and Lothar Meister, two champions from Chemnitz. They chose the West German guys18 instead, but Meister had been runner-up at the 1951 Peace Race and national road race champion in 1952. He was still only twenty-five, and he was a brilliant bike rider. Trefflich had finished fourth at the Peace Race in 1953, and then won the national championship. He was a convenient scapegoat for them because he came from an ‘old’ German background. He was from Weimar, and his family were Protestants who owned a shop.
As far as the party was concerned, people like them, small businessmen and Christians, were the worst kind of bourgeoisie. They had them down as enemies of socialism, and they discriminated against them. I had a friend who couldn’t go to high school because his father was a pastor.
EMIL
The enthusiasm of the people for the Peace Race was enormous. The side of the road would be full of people whether we were in the GDR, Czechoslovakia or Poland. Children had the day off school, and after the race we’d go and talk to them. They’d be spellbound by what we said, and I must say that made a real impression on me. Every day I got a huge pile of mail from kids, from girls, the whole population. People congratulated us and wished us well. It was all very exciting.19
DIETER
A DHfK guy named Gustav-Adolf Schur became the first GDR rider to win the Peace Race.
His nickname was ‘Täve’, and you couldn’t help but like him. He was funny, handsome and charismatic. He was popular with sports fans because he was such a great rider, and he was also a pin-up boy for the girls. The politicians loved him because he was a true believer in socialism, and they used his success as a metaphor for the GDR as a whole. Täve was the biggest star in GDR, as simple as that.
NEUES DEUTSCHLAND
ORGAN DES ZENTRALKOMITEES DER SOZIALISTISCHEN EINHEITSPARTEI DEUTSCHLANDS
On Saturday morning thousands gathered in front of Berlin’s Ostbanhof station. They were there to greet the GDR Peace Race team on their return from Warsaw, with a tumultuous reception. The chairman of the State Committee for Physical Culture and Sport, Manfred Ewald, greeted the riders with their captain, Gustav-Adolf Schur, on the crowded platform. In the afternoon the team was invited by Walter Ulbricht’s deputy to the GDR government guest house in Thälmannplatz.
Walter Ulbricht was introduced to the members of the German team and awarded Gustav-Adolf Schur the title ‘Honoured Master of Sports’. Benno Funda, Lothar Meister,20 Detlef Zabel, Emil Reinecke and Wolfgang Grupe were each presented with the title ‘Master of Sports’.
[…]
Reprinted from ‘GDR Peace Race team honoured by Walter Ulbricht’, 22 May 1955
TÄVE
Winning the Peace Race changed my life for ever. Thousands of people started writing to me, and there were 500 girls camped outside the dormitory. I realised that millions were supporting me. The point is that everybody was part of the success, and everybody felt part of it. Technically I was representing the state, but there was no distinction between the people and the state. In the GDR the people were the state.
In capitalism everybody just did their own thing. A professional cyclist could always say, ‘OK, today I don’t have the legs. I have enough money, and so it doesn’t matter if I don’t race today.’ It wasn’t like that for me. I was never ambitious for money or fame, but I understood that every time I raced I was defending the values of my country and my society.
EMIL
The prizes – and after the Peace Race they included a sailing boat – were sold, the proceeds put into a pot and shared out. Then Täve Schur divided every last mark up between us.
We had more money in our pockets than we knew what to do with, and through sport we were already privileged. When my girlfriend came to visit me in Leipzig I wanted a room at the Hotel Astoria. When they heard my name they gave me one immediately. If I needed a suit I’d just go to the tailor and he’d make one for me. The tailor knew who I was, and I had anything I wanted. I always had the best place in the restaurant.21
TÄVE
At first I was uncomfortable with it, but I had to get used to it. The pressure was enormous, but I had to do my duty and so I learned a new way to live. It wasn’t always enjoyable – in fact it could be extremely heavy at times – but I understood that I had a responsibility to set a good example.
So in essence that’s what I tried to do. I didn’t see myself as being different from other people, and nor did they. Everybody was equal in our society, and that was maybe part of the reason it became such a big thing. For some reason people I didn’t know would use the informal Du to address me, not the formal Sie. That was something you never did with people you didn’t know, but I didn’t mind it.
DIETER
My dad built me a real racing bike for my fourteenth birthday, a 1936 Diamant.
The Diamant factory was in Chemnitz, and it was a VEB,22 a publicly owned company. The VEBs had to be protected, so the federation introduced a new rule. It stipulated that if you wanted to race in the GDR you had to do it on a Diamant frame, which meant that the private framebuilders were driven out of business.
My dad was working for a private firm at the time, so his monthly wage was only about 200 marks. A new Diamant racing bike would have cost about 850 marks, and there was no way he could afford that. I think that the bike cost about 200 marks, because he knew a lot of cycling people and he’d have got it for a good price.
The bike wasn’t particularly flash, but it was good enough for me. I won all the races I entered that year. Bear in mind that I’d been training seriously for two years to get ready, so I was already pretty good at it.
DIETER
I started work six weeks after my birthday, on 1 September. It was a two-year apprenticeship and I was a lathe operator at a VEB in Einsiedel, south of Chemnitz.
The problem was that there were too few machines and too many people. They didn’t have the money to invest in new machinery, so instead everyone worked shifts. They thought it was better than sending people to work in private enterprises, and the whole point was that there was full employment. For a fourteen-year-old boy it was tough. I’d leave home at 11 p.m. and get home at eleven the next morning, so they were long days.
I suppose I could have looked for a job in a private firm like my dad, but I’d have got much less money.
TÄVE
When I left school I’d started an apprenticeship as a mechanical engineer. It had dawned on me that the boss was earning his money through my work and through the work of my colleagues. He was getting all this money but he just wasted it; he spent it on drink.
I thought that was wrong, so I started to ask myself, ‘Why is he using me to earn so much money for himself?’
DIETER
Pretty soon I was being paid more than my dad, and he’d been working all his adult life. I tried to reason with him to change, and so did my mum. He wouldn’t have it, though. He didn’t like politicians, and he always said, ‘Politics is the biggest whore.’ He said most of them were the same people who had followed Hitler.23
TÄVE
I was born in 1931, so I grew up in Hitler’s Germany.
It was a very authoritarian, very patriarchal society, and it was for ever reinforcing the idea of duty. We didn’t wear soldiers’ uniforms because we were just kids, but ideas about the state and communal responsibility were instilled into us from a very young age.
DIETER
At work you had to join the FDGB,24 the trade union, and I had to pay 16 marks for the blue FDJ25shirt. There would be an assembly in the factory, a sort of call to arms. Everyone would put the shirt on, and then somebody would stand up and give a sort of lecture. It would be about Karl Marx, communist theory, fellowship with the Russians or some such, and if memory serves we’d have to sing the FDJ anthem as well. I reckon the whole thing would normally last about fifteen minutes, and then you’d go back to your work.
The GDR was building socialism, and being in the FDJ signified that you were part of that process. The idea was that you were being ‘prepared to work and defend the homeland’, and so from time to time you’d have lessons in using a firearm. The first time I did that I nearly shot the instructor, so after that I tended to be ill when they did it.
In theory you weren’t obliged to be in the FDJ, but it was becoming more and more difficult not to. I’d managed to avoid it because Jugendweihe was only just starting in 1955, but there were twelve people in my work group and all of the others were FDJ members. I know a few people refused to join on religious or ideological grounds, but it was ruinous for them. They weren’t able to carry on with their studies, and so they never got a good job or a decent place to live.
