The Race Against the Stasi

by Herbie Sykes

  It became a way of life, and I think it was like that for a lot of divided families. You couldn’t have day-to-day contact, and so you ended up almost as trading partners. It cost us money and time, but it was Dieter’s family and I felt a duty to help. The problem was that it became progressively more time-consuming. They wanted more and more stuff, and it started to undermine the relationship between us. It was fragile enough anyway, and the trading just put it under more strain.

  As they saw it we had a responsibility to provide because we were in the ‘golden’ west. Notwithstanding the fact that we had three kids and only one income, they assumed we were rich. They thought we could just send whatever they wanted.

  So I always felt put upon, and all I got out of it was the feeling that I couldn’t do right for doing wrong. When the factory stopped buying the wool it was a blessing, to be honest.

  Dieter’s dad was a good man, but they used to send him lists of the things they wanted. It started to feel like we were just there to help them get the things they couldn’t get at home.

  DIETER

  The paradox of GDR communism is that it actually created an extreme form of capitalism.

  DIETER

  It broke down completely in 1981. They had bad pollution in the GDR, and Eberhard’s wife suffered with asthma. They couldn’t get the medicine they needed, so Sylvia had to go to the doctor and ask him for a favour. We explained the situation and he gave us the medicine, but the problem was that she needed a repeat prescription. It wasn’t her fault, but there was no way the doctor could give her it without examining the patient. So getting the medicine would have involved cheating the doctor, cheating the health insurance, cheating everybody.

  My dad came to see us and the first thing he said was ‘Listen, you need to go to the doctor and get her the prescription. If you don’t I’m going home and that will be that’. That was the final straw.

  DIETER

  So now you know how it all ended, and of course everybody blamed everybody else. I blamed my mum, she blamed me, and my poor dad was stuck in the middle of it all.

  Looking back, I suppose we were all victims. I hadn’t seen my family for all those years, and no relationship could survive that without being seriously compromised.

  RAINER

  There was always a kind of inner contact between me and Dieter. I guess it was because we’d grown up together and because, indirectly, I’d been partly responsible for his having met Sylvia. Even after all those years it hadn’t left us.

  * Reprinted from Rainer Müller’s personal file.

  * Reprinted from Rainer Müller’s personal file.

  RAINER

  Of course I remember the wall coming down – everyone does. What did I think? I thought we were free.

  DIETER

  I only ever saw my dad once more, in 1991. I got a call to say that he was ill and that I should go quickly. He died two days later.

  RAINER

  Within eighteen months Brigitte and I both lost our jobs, because the VEBs we were working in disappeared. We were both in our late forties, and suddenly we were out of work. Everything just started closing down, you know? Psychologically it was a difficult time. An extremely difficult time.

  We were lucky because we both managed to find work fairly quickly, but you still have high unemployment around here.1 People see the images of the wall coming down, all those happy people flooding through.

  DIETER

  You ask if you can ever be free of it, but that’s probably too simplistic. You get on with your life, bring your kids up, live your life as best you can. You try to be a good man and a good father, but I don’t suppose you can ever be completely free of it. What happened obviously had a profound effect on me and my family, but I’m probably not qualified to articulate it.

  NICOLE, ALEX AND NINA

  He’s an extremely quiet person, and he very seldom expresses his opinion. People mistake that for a lack of enthusiasm, or a lack of joy, but you have to understand the world he grew up in.

  He’s very intelligent and he can be quite expansive, but it takes time. If you put him in the middle of a group he’ll wait until somebody comes up to him and asks him something. People say he’s hard to know, but the few friends he has are friends for life. That’s his character, though, not the fact that he’s from the GDR.

  Yes, but that character was formed in the GDR, wasn’t it?

  SYLVIA

  It was the day after our silver wedding anniversary, and he came off his bike on his way to work. They operated, but it took him a year to recover.

  RAINER

  Dieter was very good to us. We had to build a new life, and he and Sylvia were always there for us.

  We were lucky because we both managed to find work quite quickly. We survived, and Dieter came and helped me when I built this place. He’s a good man, Dieter Wiedemann.

  NICOLE, ALEX AND NINA

  He always tried to keep his perfect little family together, and nobody from outside could penetrate it.

  It was as if he was protecting his treasure trove.

  He took early retirement when he was fifty-seven. He looks after his garden, they travel a bit, and he spends time with his grandkids. He has four of them, and they’re his pride and joy.

  SYLVIA

  He’s changed over the years, but change comes slowly, doesn’t it? He’s become less inhibited in the way he acts around other people, and they say that’s typical of former GDR people.

  DIETER

  I last saw my brother in 2002, at a Wismut reunion. We sat together and chatted a bit, but that was all.

  SYLVIA

  After reunification they introduced a ‘solidarity surcharge’ for the east. It was supposed to last five years and yet here we are, twenty-five years on, and we’re still paying it.

  1 Flöha had a registered population of 13,200 in 1989. Twenty years later it was under 10,000.

  TURIN, MAY 2014

  Two moments, both ostensibly innocuous. The first a conversation with Klaus Huhn, at his flat in East Berlin. In defending an ideology – or, more specifically, its interpretation and application – under which he thrived professionally and personally, he informed me, ‘It’s a shame that people are so fixated on this thing about the Stasi.’ Klaus’ assertion was that the Stasi was necessary within the context of the Cold War, but that in practical terms it was largely immaterial in the life quotidian of most GDR citizens.

  Then Manfred Weissleder, on a dank autumn morning at his home in Weimar. The dashing, handsome, rapier-quick star of the 1960 Peace Race remained convinced that he’d never had any ‘issues’ with the Stasi. His having ridden for the apolitical SC Karl-Marx-Stadt had presented some practical difficulties, but not, per se, ideological ones. His assertion was that the DHfK riders were more engaged politically, ergo better placed to make political capital. However, he’d never felt that his lack of ideological conviction had directly compromised his cycling career. He’d been forthright at times, downright wilful at others, and, like any number of testosterone-fuelled young athletes, had challenged the status quo. He remained convinced, however, that the authorities he’d crossed swords with had been strictly of the cycling variety. He was adamant that the Stasi had played no part in his life, and that his sporting career hadn’t been in any way conditioned by them.

  Sad to say but the reality was entirely other not only for him, but for all GDR cyclists. And, by extension, for all the thousands of state-sponsored athletes who represented their country over its forty-year existence.

  My starting position for this book was that it wouldn’t fall into the Stasi ‘trap’. I was broadly supportive of the socialist canon, and resolved that the narrative wouldn’t become mired in what Klaus euphemistically termed ‘The Flying Dutchman’. My conviction was that I would avoid making sweeping judgements about the GDR as a state, and it was precisely this conviction which informed my methodology in writing it. Put simply, I’d no intention of writing a treatise
on GDR socialism, much less the Stasi. Rather, I would let Dieter and Sylvia tell their story and, with a fair wind, that of the sporting leviathan which was the Peace Race.

  I wasn’t deluding myself that the Stasi wouldn’t have a part to play, simply because Dieter Wiedemann had defected. I was, however, utterly deluded in respect to its malevolence and reach, and to the politicisation of daily life in the GDR. The fact is that, notwithstanding its amorphous nature, the Stasi was everywhere, even in the formative years of the GDR. It was your former classmate, your coach and your colleague at the sport club. It was the shop steward at your place of work, your neighbour, as likely as not your very good friend. If the party – and its evident paranoia in respect to all things western – established the qualifying criteria for ‘enemies of the state’, the Stasi applied it more or less pejoratively. That much of its methodology was predicated on falsehoods was seemingly academic. In the GDR interpretation of socialism everything was subjugate to the idea, and all truths therefore transmutable. And therein, in its colossal hubris and arrogance, lay the cancer at the heart of the Eastern Bloc dystopia.

  The obvious question, therefore, is whether Dieter Wiedemann was a ‘victim’ of the GDR or, like Klaus, one of its beneficiaries. Dieter’s excellence as a cyclist afforded him the opportunity to travel, a basic human right denied to all but a tiny minority. In that sense he was extremely unusual and, amidst the lunacy of the Cold War, extremely privileged. By the same token it could be argued that he and his like – Täve included – were but pawns in a geopolitical game of chess. An obvious question, then, but one which isn’t so very easy to distil. The GDR put a roof over your head and offered a job for life (at least until it committed political and financial euthanasia) just so long as you were suitably convinced, or suitably opportunistic. However, those who weren’t, those who refused to subscribe to what amounted to a monumental self-deceit, were simply thrown to the wolves. The millions who saw no alternative but to play along, as often as not in order simply to be left alone, would have cause to contemplate their own duplicity. Their own moral bankruptcy. Hans Modrow, one of the GDR’s few credible politicians, made reference to ‘the deformation of character by ideology.’

  Dieter Wiedemann will never know whether his mother attempted suicide in the wake of his defection, or whether it was part of the Stasi’s bungled plan to repatriate him. She never spoke of it, and nor did his brother Eberhard when we met. Nor was Dieter privy to the desolation the Stasi visited upon their father, a good man in a horrific storm. What he does know is that his family was torn asunder as a direct consequence of his having fallen in love with a girl from Giessen, some 200 miles west of Flöha. However, only now, fifty years on, is he becoming acquainted with the full extent of the damage, and with the extent of the psychosis which enveloped the state he represented (if that is the right word) with such distinction. Peace Race rider or otherwise, he’s not so very different from any number of former East Germans in that respect. Just like them he’s trying to come to terms with his shadow life, and with the collateral effect of his decision to defect. Just like them he’s having to find a new way to live, and to find an antidote for the venom contained within his Stasi file. Dieter Wiedemann is a Tour de France finisher. He is a man of resolve, but his road to redemption is going to be long, and not a little painful.

  And the Peace Race? In Leipzig I met with Uwe Ampler, Klaus’ son. He won the thing three times in the eighties and then, when the wall fell, rode the Tour de France for a professional team. When I asked him about his Peace Races he said, somewhat dolefully, that his victories were as nothing compared with his father’s 1963 triumph. Uwe Ampler was a very fine cyclist, but by the end the event, the sporting synthesis of communism’s great victory, had become a pale imitation of its former self. Though the racing itself was never less than thrilling, the idealism which had illuminated those early editions had dissipated. By the end the proletariat had long since ceased to believe, and long since ceased to care. So, yes, the perfect sporting metaphor right to the last.

  It staggered on for a few years following reunification, but became naught but another underfunded stage race in professional cycling’s bloated calendar. The Peace Race became a parody of itself, before the money – irony of ironies – ran out altogether in 2007. It spluttered back into some sort of half-life in 2014, though inexplicably the new owners saw fit to dispense with the dove. Too heavy with Cold War symbolism, they blustered to nobody in particular. Whatever; best is to state that a three-day under-23 stage race named the Peace Race exists, that it takes place in the Czech Republic in May, and that it is wholly irrelevant.

  As I write Sylvia Hermann, the girl in the bedroom window, lies in a hospital bed in Düsseldorf. She is terminally ill with breast cancer, and it’s touch and go whether she will see the publication of this book. Through the days, weeks and months spent trying to understand and then render this thing, I am reminded always of her unbreakable optimism, of her humility and forbearance. I’m reminded of the horror of the Second World War, and of the treacherous journey that the Hermanns – one family among millions – were compelled to undertake at the cessation. Theirs was, quite literally, a race for peace, and yet it merely presaged the geopolitical maelstrom of the Cold War. I think of Karl Wiedemann, a simple man trying, as best he could, to indemnify his family against the ideological madhouse which was the GDR. Like the Hermanns, he and his flock were the innocent flotsam and jetsam the psychopaths Hitler and Stalin left in their respective wakes.

  Two families, each German, each entrenched in their country’s age of torment. Two hundred miles between Giessen and Flöha.

  Twenty-five years since the fall of the wall … Putin’s ‘freedom fighters’ lay siege to eastern Ukraine, while his grotesque propaganda machine spins lies about ‘fascists’ in Kiev.

  And so begins the fourth life of Dieter Wiedemann.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Applebaum, Anne. Iron Curtain, Penguin Books, 2013

  Bruce, Gary. Resistance with the People, Rowman & Littlefield, 2003

  –– The Firm, Oxford University Press, 2012

  Ferenc, Jakub. Sport w służbie polityki, Wydawnictwo TRIO, 2008

  Fulbrook, Mary. The People’s State, Yale University Press, 2005

  Ghous, Nessim. The Conditions, Means and Methods of the MfS in the GDR, Cuvillier Verlag, 2004

  Gieseke, Jens. The GDR State Security, Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic, 2006

  Hönel, Manfred, and Ludwig, Olaf. 100 Highlights Friedensfahrt, Sport Verlag Berlin, 1997

  Johnson, Uwe. The Third Book about Achim, Jonathan Cape, 1968

  Małcużyński, K., and Weiss, Z. Kronika Wielkiego Wyścigu, Książka i Wiedza, 1952

  Martin, Mäik. 50 Jahre Course de la Paix, Agentur Contrukt, 1998

  Miller, Barbara. The Stasi Files Unveiled, Transaction Publishers, 2004

  Riordan, James (ed.). Sport Under Communism, C. Hurst & Co., 1978

  Schur, Gustav-Adolf. Täve, Neues Leben, 2011

  Taylor, Frederik. The Berlin Wall, Bloomsbury, 2006

  Tuszyński, Bogdan, and Marszałek, Daniel. Wyścig Pokoju 1948–2001, Fundacja Dobrej Ksič…żi, 2002

  Ullrich, Klaus. Fahrt der Millionen, Sport Verlag Berlin, 1967

  Wilkinson Johnson, Molly. Training Socialist Citizens, Brill, 2008

  Zetzsche, Peter. Friedensfahrt und Tour de France

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In the first instance I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to David Luxton and Rebecca Winfield. Without their professionalism, enthusiasm and equilibrium this thing would have been stillborn; who says the publishing industry is populated exclusively by sharks and ne’er-do-wells? I’m also hugely indebted to Robin Harvie for having believed in such a ridiculous, quixotic scheme, for caring about it and for seeing it through.

  Thanks, too, for Timm Kölln for his intelligence and friendship, and for his pricele
ss efforts on my behalf. Then to Thomas Lovegrove for his enthusiasm, and for his having acquainted me with Die Waltz. To Dave Almond, there are simply no words (excepting perhaps Ordnung). I am immensely grateful to Jan and Täve Schur, and to all of the interviewees who gave of their time. Thanks in particular to Jirka Grahl and Olaf Koppe at Neues Deutschland.

  Ruediger Droysen von Hamilton, Roswitha Loos, Babette Pech and their colleagues at BStU were truly exemplary, and jumped through a great many hoops on my behalf. Horst Schäfer at the Friedensfahrt Museum was an inspiration, and Peter Zetzsche’s kindness was invaluable. Elsewhere Ian Steel, Allan Butler, Stephen Flockhart and a host of others helped to fire my imagination. Dan Hayes, as ever, had a very bright idea, so may the Lord in his mercy …

  Thank you to Dr Bernhard Dyckhoff for persuading Dieter in the first instance, and for his limitless good grace, patience and fortitude. Thank you to Dieter’s daughter, Nicole, for the countless, thankless hours she toiled on my behalf, for her exemplary work ethic and her excellence as a translator. And thanks, finally and overwhelmingly, to Sylvia and Dieter. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for having had the courage to allow me to make this book, still more so at such a difficult time. Vi voglio bene.

  And to my P. Quite how you put up with this is beyond me, but somehow you did and somehow you do. Ti amo.