by Herbie Sykes
The statement, signed by coach Werner Schiffner, Peace Race winner Erich Hagen, Günter Lörke, Egon Adler and also Schur and Eckstein, states: ‘A traitor cannot stop the development of our sport. Through extensive training and continued high performance, we want to continue the development of socialist physical culture in our country.’ The cycling presidium states the following in respect to the dubious lifestyle of Scharch:
‘Because of his immoral attitude, Scharch was relieved of his position as president of the federation. He then showed his true character by betraying the socialist sports movement and our workers and farmers’ state. His untruthful statements in the West German media and that of other countries, serve exclusively to further his own possibilities and to enable him to continue his unsound moral conduct. The presidium maintains that our association has at all times respected and adhered to the statutes of the UCI, and will continue to do so.’ […]
Reprinted from ‘A traitor cannot stop us’, 31 October 1960
* Reprinted from ‘The Olympic committee of the German Democratic Republic replies to Mr Scharch’s allegations – Letter of 15 November 1960’, IOC Bulletin no. 73
NEUE ZEIT
Berlin (ADN). The General Public Prosecutor of Berlin announces that, according to an investigation initiated because of continued misappropriation and fraud, an arrest warrant has been issued against the former president of the GDR Cycling Federation, Werner Scharch. In his capacity as president of the GDR Cycling Federation, Scharch embezzled funds entrusted to him, and spent them for personal purposes. Search measures have been initiated against the defector.
Reprinted from ‘Proceedings against Scharch’, 15 November 196034
DIETER
1960 had been the best year of my life. I had been the youngest in the group, so I’d had no pressure and I’d improved a lot. Then our team had won the Peace Race and the World Championship, and I’d been to the Sachsenring as a guest. I’d also won the national championship with Wismut and met Sylvia. Life was fun, and looking back now I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been happier.
I wasn’t ready for the Peace Race, but I started the new year with another big objective. It was the Tour of Egypt, a twelve-day stage race in January.
Egypt was prestigious because it confirmed that they thought I was one of the most promising young riders in the GDR, a potential Peace Race candidate. What’s more, it was a chance to fly, and to experience a part of the world that normal people could never dream of seeing. I was still only nineteen, so it was a huge step in my career and a big moment in my life. It was my first time outside of Germany, and my first time on an aeroplane.
We set off in the middle of January, because it started on the 26th, the last Thursday of the month. We stopped off in Prague, then the plane failed in Budapest so we had an overnight stay there. Then we went on to Bucharest, and there was another three-day stopover in Tirana because of fog. We’d set off ten days early to acclimatise, but by the time we got there we’d been travelling for a week. Even when we reached Cairo we still had to take a train to Luxor. It was 850 kilometres, and it was 30°.
The flights were terrifying, but being in Egypt was magical. There were sights and sounds I could never have dreamed of: the Pyramids, Cairo, the food.
DIETER
Egypt had been twelve stages and 1,800 kilometres in ferocious heat. I’d finished seventh on GC and we’d won the team prize, so it was a big success. The problem was that I already had 5,000 kilometres in my legs, and they put me straight back on the same training programme as the others. My body wasn’t ready for that kind of workload, and I needed two or three weeks of low-intensity riding to recover.
They said I had to stick to the training plan but by the time the domestic races started I was exhausted. In the first race I was out the back after 80 kilometres, then 60 kilometres the following week. By April I was in a terrible state.
I went to see the doctor and he told me I needed to take four weeks off. I read, wrote to Sylvia, walked in the forest and just did light exercises. Then, in May, I followed the Peace Race on the radio and in the papers.
MANFRED
I’d won four stages at the 1960 Peace Race, but everyone remembers me for a stage I didn’t win, in 1961. If I run into somebody round town they don’t say, ‘You’re Weissleder! You had the yellow jersey and won all those stages!’ Instead they say, ‘You’re Weissleder! I remember you! You hit that Russian guy with your pump!’
It happened in the stadium at Poznań. I was already well known because I’d won in Poznań the previous year, but now there was a group of seven of us coming into the stadium. Two of them were Russians, Pietrow and Melichow, the yellow jersey. They knew I was the fastest, so Melichow just grabbed hold of my jersey. That enabled Pietrow to win the stage, but I wasn’t having it because it was unsporting. I whacked Melichow with my pump, and at that moment I became a big hero for the Polish people.35
Bernhard Trefflich had told me that there was hostility to the GDR riders in Poland, but he’d ridden in the early 1950s. By the time we came along the Russians were the common enemy, and the Polish fans hated them. I wasn’t interested in politics, and I didn’t view it in ideological terms. For me it was just a bike race, but when I hit Melichow they said that I’d ‘violated German–Soviet friendship’.
Then again everyone in the stadium – and everyone at home – had thought that what I’d done was correct. They still thank me for it today, but it had serious repercussions for my cycling career.
DIETER
I hadn’t touched the bike for a month, but when the Peace Race finished I started training again. I felt better, and I wanted to be ready for the Tour of the GDR in August.
DIETER
Politics weren’t something that interested me, and I certainly wouldn’t describe myself as a dissident or anything like that. I suppose you could say that I’d managed to avoid it until that point, but that all changed on Sunday 13 August 1961.36
* Press conference, 15 June 1961
NEUES DEUTSCHLAND
ORGAN DES ZENTRALKOMITEES DER SOZIALISTISCHEN EINHEITSPARTEI DEUTSCHLANDS
The traditional Berlin–Lübben-Berlin race, 160 kilometres, was won yesterday by Barleben (SC Einheit Berlin) in 3.50.40. […] The group from West Berlin was unable to contest any of the leading positions.
Reprinted from ‘Berlin–Lübben–Berlin for Barleben’, 14 August 1961
DIETER
You assumed that it was a temporary thing, and I don’t think anybody really understood the full implications of it. The feeling was that the politicians would sort it out somehow, and that things would just go back to normal.
My first direct encounter with it was on 17 August, four days later. I went to Berlin to ride the Tour of the GDR, and normally the race started in the centre, on Alexanderplatz or at the Brandenburg Gate. There were tanks there, though, so we had to start somewhere else.37 Even the Berlin riders didn’t really know what was going on. They started telling us about friends who had gone to work in West Berlin, in restaurants and suchlike, and hadn’t been able to get home. That’s how the reality of what they’d done began to sink in.
NEUES DEUTSCHLAND
ORGAN DES ZENTRALKOMITEES DER SOZIALISTISCHEN EINHEITSPARTEI DEUTSCHLANDS
At the Park Hotel in Düsseldorf – site last year of the meeting between the two German Olympic committees prior to the Rome games – members of the FRG Olympic Committee and the executive board of the FRG Sports Confederation bowed to the command of the Bonn extremists on Wednesday: sporting relations between the two German states were to be terminated, and negotiations with FRG sports associations prohibited!
The step will be met with dismay not only in Germany, but across the world. Early opinion suggests that international sporting federations are absolutely unwilling to follow this path.
The general secretary of the European Swimming Union, the Swede Bertil Sällfors, emphatically declared that the European Swimming Championships of 196
2 will go ahead in Leipzig; ‘We are very pleased with the preparations, and see no reason to change our decision.’ Within the last few days representatives of other sports federations have made similar statements.
Eyewitnesses in Düsseldorf assure us that Willi Daume, president of the FRG Olympic Committee, had great difficulty in enforcing the demand – made inter alia by Willy Brandt – to terminate sporting relations. The conference was scheduled to finish at 10 p.m., but lasted ten hours and finished at midnight. […]38
The measures of the GDR government were implemented in the small hours of Sunday morning. Later that morning the capital hosted the start of the Berlin–Lübben–Berlin bike race. At the start thirty-five West Berlin amateurs were present, and almost to a man they’d arrived that very morning. The race therefore disproved for ever the assertion that the GDR has impeded sporting relations anywhere. […]
Daume is a well-known member of the International Olympic Committee. In reference to its members, the IOC statutes expressly specify that: ‘The IOC chooses its members as lifelong agents for work in the country concerned. They must be independent, and may not accept orders from local state or sporting authorities.’
And yet there is proof that the termination of sporting relations was in fact just such an order. It was first reported in Bild-Zeitüng on Monday, while the bourgeois Welt underlined it on Tuesday. On Wednesday the failure, Willy Brandt, simply used it to appease his disillusioned followers.
That ten hours were necessary speaks volumes for the fact that it was extremely difficult to silence the voice of reason. Daume, however, followed the orders of the extremists in Bonn and West Berlin. One thinks: the politician Kennedy saw no reason to instigate ‘measures’, while the supposedly apolitical Daume was obliged so to do. By whom? That question has answered itself […]
At almost precisely the same time that the decision to boycott the GDR was made, the International Archery Federation (FITA) in Oslo recognised the GDR as a full and equal member!
Reprinted from ‘Bonn orders: Terminate!’, 18 August 1961
NEUES DEUTSCHLAND
ORGAN DES ZENTRALKOMITEES DER SOZIALISTISCHEN EINHEITSPARTEI DEUTSCHLANDS
Dessau, 24 August. On Wednesday morning, long before the Tour of the GDR family woke, a famous racing cyclist-turned-coach drove to the train station in Nordhausen. Alongside Otto Busse sat a cyclist who has ridden for GDR many times, and who in 1960 won the biggest prize of all, the Peace Race. His name: Erich Hagen.
Few words were exchanged as the Leipziger took his leave. Hagen was bidding farewell not only to this year’s tour, but also to the group seeking to earn selection for the world championships. He had punctured, fallen behind and had apparently taken umbrage at the comments of some ill-informed fans. His answer had consisted of raising the white flag and putting his bike into the sag-wagon long before Nordhausen. With this attitude, he did no favours to either his team or the event, but more importantly it seems to us that this affair should be seen an altogether different light […]
In reference to Gorki’s famous ‘universities’, someone once called our tour the primary school of GDR cycling. Since even the aces are present every year, it proves just how difficult it is to graduate from this primary school. Young, enthusiastic riders afford the famous riders no privileges, and don’t give them an inch without a fight. Year after year each of them must demonstrate his ability anew. No factory team helps him, but he and his team is all that exists.
Those who are not prepared – and this applies both to body and nerve – will not pass the examination. Even if, like Erich Hagen, they can point to great victories, they will find themselves driving, silent and unnoticed, to the train station in the early morning,. That’s not to say that Erich won’t be awarded a very good mark at the next exam […]
Reprinted from ‘The hard exam’, 25 August 1961
DIETER
I don’t know exactly what Hagen said, but I know that he expressed some sort of anti-wall sentiment. He was thrown out of DHfK, sent back to work and back to his BSG.39 Hagen was a champion, and so they were sending out a pretty clear warning. They were saying that if you criticised them in any way they would make you pay, irrespective of who you were.
On a personal level the race was a success. I won the time trial to Kyffhäuser and finished third on GC behind Täve and Klaus Ampler.
NEUES DEUTSCHLAND
ORGAN DES ZENTRALKOMITEES DER SOZIALISTISCHEN EINHEITSPARTEI DEUTSCHLANDS
Forty-eight hours ago the West Berlin police built a camp at the border. Their tents contain a list with the names of ninety persons who, in the humble opinion of interior minister Lipschitz, are considered ‘undesirable’. Among them is the name of Gustav-Adolf Schur, a man who can claim, uniquely, to have won the rainbow jerseys of the world amateur champion twice in succession. This is doubtless an invitation for satirists, because who would be inclined to take this ‘blacklist’ at all seriously? Täve Schur, who two days ago won his fourth Tour of the GDR, is celebrated in Australia as well as in Italy, France, Holland and Sweden. He has won the Tour of Dortmund and the Conti-Pris in Hannover, and is a byword for fair, honest athletes not just in the GDR. In the desk of his apartment in Leipzig’s Ebertallee the invitations stack up from any number of countries and cities. Lipschitz may be sure that this latest initiative is guaranteed to flop.
Reprinted from ‘Lipschitz blacklists Täve’, 27 August 1961
DIETER
When people talk about the border closure they tend to focus on the fact that you could no longer travel. That was a big problem for border communities, people who worked in West Berlin and people with family in the west. The majority of the GDR people, however, didn’t live near the border, and couldn’t afford to buy anything in the west anyway.
Prior to the wall most people had tolerated the shortages and the propaganda, even if they didn’t believe in it. Most people weren’t interested in politics, and just wanted to be left alone. My dad would be an example of that. He thought all the sloganeering was nonsense, but he put up with it because he didn’t want to uproot his family.
For most people the bigger problem was that day-to-day life started to become more oppressive once it was built. Previously they’d been trying to dissuade people from defecting, but now there was no way for them to leave.
So they didn’t need to pretend any more, and the political rhetoric started to become even more aggressive. Then it seemed like there were more and more people who just didn’t contribute. The army, the police, the Stasi … It was bad enough that none of them were producing anything, but they seemed intent on interfering in other people’s lives as well. The climate changed almost overnight, and I’d say that it became a climate of fear. You were in a trap, but you’d no choice but to conform if you didn’t want to be singled out.
People would rush to the polling booths early in the morning. They were trying to demonstrate that they were committed socialists, but in reality it was all about being seen to be. That was the way you got a decent job, a decent home and an education for your kids. So you had to vote just to get along, but in themselves the elections were a pointless exercise.40
RAINER
If you didn’t vote you got a knock on the door, so you just played the game. You voted.
DIETER
My being a cyclist indemnified me to a degree, but it also meant that I saw both sides of it. I was privileged and well paid, and I got everything I needed to do my job. Then again I knew that I was very much the exception. I knew that there was progressively less in the shops, because my mum spent all week running around trying to get things. At the same time there was an elite class consuming things which ordinary people couldn’t buy in the shops. They had been chosen because they were politicians, sportsmen and suchlike, but there was no way for normal working people even to aspire to those things. They kept telling us that capitalism was terrible, but this was the opposite of communism.
Millions of people in the GDR had gro
wn up under fascism, and then they’d lived through the war. Many of them had never travelled, didn’t know any other way of living, and didn’t know what was going on in the west. It was quite easy to convince them that the GDR was better, and that’s what the party tried to do. They told them that thanks to Moscow they were living in a haven of peace and fellowship, while Bonn and Washington were full of criminals, hooligans and warmongers. People read Neues Deutschland every day, absorbed the propaganda on the radio and got on with it as best they could. After a while they stopped questioning what was happening to their country, I guess because they’d nothing better to compare it with.
Anyway the wall was built now, and it was clear that it was here to stay. The Americans hadn’t done anything, and there was nothing anybody else could do.
SYLVIA
Gradually we started to write more frequently. Sometimes I wouldn’t have time, and he’d become frustrated if I didn’t write.
Everyone thought I was a bit odd. My mum and dad couldn’t understand it, but my grandfather was the worst. He said, ‘Why do you want to carry on writing to this sports kid from the GDR, when there’s a wall between you and him? It’ll never work! You’re a dreamer, and so is he!’
I started working in a department store, doing merchandising and window dressing. My boss said there were lots of boys I could have gone out with in Mitterteich, instead of wasting my time with one I could never hope to be with. There was a guy who used to drive past the shop every day, and when he saw me in the window he’d wave and sound his horn. He liked me, and so did the butcher’s son. He was always asking me out, but I wasn’t in the least bit interested. I was just a typical teenager I guess, and the more they told me it was stupid the more determined I was to carry on. Everything was against us, but that’s part of being a teenager, isn’t it? I suppose Dieter and I were building our own secret world. We were building a fence around ourselves, and nobody else was allowed in.
