Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  Thanks to the Scots, who beat the former Soviet Union 3-0, both Germany and Holland progressed to the semifinals. Holland had to play Denmark, and Germany Sweden, but both sides expected to reach the final. “I’ve always said we’d meet Germany twice in this tournament,” Michels told the press. “The next time it will be difficult again.”

  Michels’ nicknames are The Sphinx, The General, and The Bull. He is, then, no Ally MacLeod, hardly given to hubris, and yet he forgot that Holland had to beat Denmark in the semifinal first. So did everyone else in Holland. Several charter flights to the semifinal were annulled, as fans saved for the final against Germany. Against Denmark, whole sections of the stands stayed empty. Naturally the Dutch lost. They were just too arrogant. Peter Schmeichel, the Danish keeper, noted with rage that they barely bothered to slap hands when Bergkamp scored their first goal. After the game they were distraught: Germany had beaten Sweden to reach the final. “We’ve saved the Germans’ skin. They’re already world champions and now they’ll get our title. This will give me sleepless nights,” said Van Breukelen.

  The Germans lost the final, and in Copenhagen, the Danish players and the crowd sang, “Auf Wiedersehen, Deutschland.” They had been occupied too.

  Holland vs. Germany will lose its edge soon. For a few years from 1988, Holland had the most glorious players in Europe and Germany some of the dullest. As Gullit, Rijkaard, Van Basten, Wouters and Ronald Koeman retire from international soccer, Germany will start to beat Holland easily. Perhaps our players will even cease to be better human beings than theirs. When that happens the Dutch will give up on Holland vs. Germany, and the Clingendael Institute will no longer need to worry.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE SOCCER DISSIDENT

  I MOVED TO BERLIN in September 1990, ten months after the Wall fell. The city then had two big clubs, FC Berlin in the East and Hertha BSC in the West, and Helmut Klopfleisch had already moved from East to West.

  FC Berlin had been called Dynamo Berlin. Before the Wall fell, they had played in the Jahn Stadium, ten minutes’ walk from my first flat in East Berlin. The neighborhood, the Prenzlauer Berg, was one of the few in Berlin to have survived the Allied bombs, and was long since decrepit. The last repairmen had called in the 1920s, and in May 1945 the Red Army had had to fight for every street. My building was one of the few without bullet holes, but to make up for that, the window of the front door, a fine example of 1920s art deco, was broken in four places. The wind blew in—the peculiar air in Berlin means it always feels ten degrees colder than it is—and provided relief against the stench of cat urine.

  On the landings you could listen to the noises from each flat: the arguments, the coffee being poured, and the coal shovelled. The tenants were usually all home: four of the seven breadwinners in the building were no longer winning bread, and the neighbor, once some species of bureaucrat, had become a cleaning woman. “If it was up to me they’d rebuild the Wall tomorrow,” she liked to say. She had yet to lose the habit of calling East Berlin “Berlin.”

  Apart from mass unemployment, neo-Nazi graffiti, and the odd Rumanian beggar with polio, East Berlin still looked like a Communist capital, and it always seemed to be November. The city is built in khaki, light brown, and endless shades of grey, and no joy is provided by the statues of stern socialist workers, which resemble nothing so much as the statues of Aryans they replaced. In the center of town Marx and Engels survive in stone: Marx sitting, Engels standing. Lenin would presumably be lying down. “Next time it will work out better,” someone had scrawled on the front of the statue, and on the back: “We are sorry.” It was an exciting time to be in Berlin. As an Eastern student magazine grumbled: “Hardly anything is as it used to be and, on the other hand, no one knows what it will become. The only thing that’s certain is that it will change.”

  No one knew what Dynamo would become, but they had already changed their name and left the Jahn Stadium, where they could no longer afford the rent. The ground was the smartest building in the Prenzlauer Berg. It lay just yards from the old Wall, and whenever I passed it on my way West to make a phone call I marvelled. Its towering floodlights, twice the height of the stands and quite as gray, gave the ground the feel of a prison camp, which on matchdays it had been. To prevent escapes, soldiers had occupied the stand nearest the border during games. Crowds were small.

  Dynamo was popularly known as the “Eleven Schweine.” They were the least loved club in Europe, but they were also the most successful: between 1979 and 1988, they won the East German title ten times in a row.

  Dynamo had been founded after the war with the expressed aim of keeping the East German league title in the capital. The club president until the revolution of 1989 was Erich Mielke, the feared octogenarian chief of the East German secret police, the Stasi. Mielke was known as Erich the Elder to distinguish him from Erich Honecker, leader of the GDR, who was Erich the Younger. (Honecker was only in his seventies.) Mielke loved his club and made all the best players in the GDR play for it. (One was Thomas Doll, now with Gazza at Lazio.) He also talked to referees, and Dynamo won lots of matches with penalties in the 95th minute.

  In East Berlin, Union were the workers’ club that Dynamo always aspired to be. The club’s braver fans would intersperse their chants of “Iron Union” with “Deutschland, Deutschland,” and when Union met Dynamo, the ground would be full, with everyone supporting Union. Dynamo always won, and ten minutes from the end the crowd would leave the stadium.

  Dynamo’s players were by no means over the moon at winning the league every year, but most of the time they kept their mouths shut. A couple of years before the Wall fell, the club’s striker Andreas Thom was allowed to give an interview to the West German magazine Stern. “A lot of people flee the GDR because they do not like life here,” Thom confessed, concluding timidly: “I believe this is a very unusual country.”

  He was still banned from talking to the Western press when the Wall fell. When it did, he and his colleagues immediately joined Bundesliga clubs. Jürgen Bogs, the manager with ten league titles, stayed at Dynamo, but seemed unable to work his old magic.

  By the time I arrived in the city, FC Berlin was playing at the tiny Sportforum ground. (I tried to find it one night and failed.) They were by then drawing crowds of just 1,000, so many of whom were hooligans that it was possible to speak of a lunatic majority. These sons of Communist officials and Stasi agents ranked marginally below Colombian drug dealers and Serb ethnic cleansers as the nastiest people on Earth. Because of their contacts, they could travel to the West even in the old days: once, a large group followed Dynamo to Monaco. After the Wall fell, they bizarrely began to combine Communism with neo-Nazism: their favorite chants were “Sieg Heil” and “We love Mielke.” FC Berlin despaired. The club hired a PR company to whiten their name, but were swiftly relegated to the Berlin amateur league. In five years’ time, perhaps sooner, two lines in a local paper will announce that FC Berlin (East German champions 1979-1988) have folded.

  West Berlin had Hertha. Champions of Germany in 1930 and 1931, they were what the Germans call a Tradition Club, and they had once been the team of all Berlin. But on the night of August 13, 1961, the Wall went up, and half of Hertha’s players and fans found themselves sealed up in East Berlin. The club began to buy the wrong players, suffered bribery scandals, missed a teenage winger named Pierre Littbarski who was playing around the corner, and in the mid-Eighties even descended to the Berlin amateur league. They were playing in the German second division when the Wall came down, and hordes of tearful East Berliners in 1950s’ Hertha shirts descended on the Olympic Stadium. Perhaps Hertha’s greatest Eastern fan was Helmut Klopfleisch.

  Anyone who thinks that soccer has nothing to do with politics should speak to Klopfleisch. He is a large, blond, moon-faced man who was expelled from the GDR for supporting the wrong teams. I met him towards the end of my time in Berlin. It was 1991, he had left East Berlin two years before, and the GDR was no longer even a place on the m
ap, but he could not stop himself talking about Communism. “I can’t sleep at night anymore, my wife can’t sleep at night, because the criminals who ran that country are still free.” It was a theme he returned to every few minutes, quite involuntarily, as his wife to-and-froed with coffee and cake.

  I have two sources of information on Klopfleisch’s extraordinary life: he is one, and the other is the bulging file that Mielke’s Stasi kept on him. The new German state has let the victims of the Stasi read their own files. Famous East German novelists have published theirs; Klopfleisch has posted me photocopies of his. It is a credit to the Stasi that their account of his life tallies in every detail with his.

  Klopfleisch, both sources agree, was born in East Berlin in 1948, and lived there until 1989. He worked as an electrician in a People’s Company, and later as a window cleaner in a rare private firm. “We were little people because they kept us little,” he told me. He explained that he had changed jobs because in the People’s Company “they told you what to think all the time.”

  He likes to talk, or as the Stasi put it, he has “an emotional manner that is founded in his character.” The file warns: “K. has a good mental grasp and is able to recognize connections.” (Had the Stasi not always used his initial, the file would read a little less like Kafka.)

  On politics, the file says: “From his comments it is clear that he informs himself from Western electronic mass media. K. glorifies the Bundesliga. In K’s opinion sport and politics have nothing to do with one another.” This was not a view the Stasi shared. When the West German bureaucrat handed Klopfleisch his file, she told him: “It’s all about soccer!”

  “The leisure interests of the K. family are largely limited to soccer and their weekend plot of land at . . .” the Stasi reports. Klopfleisch elaborated to me: “The best times in East Germany were in our summer house. It was outside Berlin, quiet, nobody around, no Communist propaganda, and we’d sit there on a summer’s evening watching Western soccer and we’d be happy. When we were in our summer house it felt like being in the West. It was our Little California. Then, when we left the GDR, they took it away from us.” He has been trying for five years now to get it back.

  “K. calls himself a fanatical supporter of the West Berlin soccer club ‘Hertha BSC,’ ” the file says. When he was born, three years after the war, Hertha had already moved from the east of the city to the west. But the Wall had yet to be built, and so as a boy Klopfleisch went to Hertha’s home games. The Wall went up when he was 13. “It was a mad, German thing to do. You wouldn’t build a Wall across the center of London, would you?” He had to wait 28 years before he next saw his club play at home.

  For the first few months after the Wall went up, he spent Saturday afternoons standing beside it among a mass of East Berlin Hertha fans, listening to the sounds coming from the Hertha ground just a few hundred yards from the frontier. When the crowd at the ground cheered, the group behind the Iron Curtain cheered too. Soon the border guards put a stop to this. Later, Hertha moved to the Olympic Stadium, which lies at the western end of West Berlin, miles from the Wall and out of earshot.

  What to do? “We had a “Hertha Society” in East Berlin—illegal of course. We used to meet once a month, in a different place each time. Often we registered as a bingo club, and booked the back room of a café. Every meeting we would get a visit from the manager of Hertha, and sometimes players or directors would come across. I think I’ve met every Hertha manager of the past few decades. We relied on them to tell us what was going on at the club—not the normal things, because we knew those from Western radio and TV, but the inside stuff, the real gossip. We needed information, because otherwise we were on the moon. The managers must have thought we were a bunch of lunatics, but they always said how sad it was for us. We warned them to keep the meetings secret, but they’d go back and write in the match program that they’d been to see Hertha’s loyal fans in East Berlin again. It was plain boasting. So of course the Stasi became suspicious, and they would stop the managers at the border. Once they stripped Jürgen Sündemann naked. Every meeting we’d sit there waiting, wondering whether the manager would get through. It was exciting, an adventure.”

  “I supported Hertha, Bayern Munich and the West German national team, but really I used to back any Western side against any Eastern side. I was there when Dynamo Berlin played Aston Villa, when they played Liverpool, when Vorwãrts Frankfurt played Manchester United. I love Manchester United. I remember a Dennis Law header from 20 yards out that was like another player’s shot. When they beat our teams, our papers would write, ‘The professional soccer players from England . . . ,’ pretending that ours were amateurs!”

  It is a minor irony of history that the only match between the two Germanies was won by the GDR: at the World Cup of 1974, they beat the West 1-0. (Jürgen Sparwasser, scorer of the goal, later defected to the West.) Klopfleisch looked away when I mentioned the game. “I just can’t understand it,” he said. “It was a day of mourning in our house. There were big celebrations in East Berlin, even though it was just a lucky win. The worst of it all was the 300 Party bosses in the stands, waving their little flags with the East German sign, clapping at all the wrong moments because they knew nothing about soccer.”

  Klopfleisch had had to watch the game on television. He could only travel within the Soviet bloc—and he did. He pulled out a photograph album filled with pictures of himself with various Western greats: Klopfleisch with Franz Beckenbauer, with Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, with Bobby Moore, with Bobby Charlton, with his arm around Roger Milla. The photos are products of his journeys through Eastern Europe to watch visiting Western teams. On a window cleaner’s salary? “It was always incredibly expensive, but because I wasn’t in a trade union, we couldn’t get any other holidays anyway.”

  In three decades he saw Hertha play once, in Poland, against Lech Poznan. There was a great queue at the Polish border that day, but the East German border guards knew about the match and were turning cars back. Klopfleisch had anticipated this, and had brought his mother along. At the frontier he pointed at her and said, “She grew up in Poland. I’m taking her to see her old home again.” It was a lie, but the border guards let him through and Klopfleisch saw the match. He thought he had beaten the system, but the Stasi knew about the trip. The game is listed in their catalogue of his soccer journeys abroad. “The family tries to use all opportunities to experience Bundesliga teams live,” warns the file.

  The Stasi, sparing no expense, accompanied Klopfleisch everywhere. “K., by his behavior at the People’s Republic of Bulgaria vs. the Federal Republic of Germany, has significantly damaged the international reputation of the GDR,” an agent reported sadly. It mentions a number of other soccer dissidents who likewise blotted the GDR’s noble reputation. Klopfleisch later read in his file that his boss at the private window-cleaning firm had discussed his trip to Sofia with the Stasi. “The comrade was very open and declared himself prepared to support the security organs further,” says the Stasi report of the meeting. Klopfleisch had liked his boss.

  Bayern Munich visited Czechoslovakia in 1981, and the Stasi took measures “to prevent the arrival of inimical negative forces/criminally dangerous persons, as also negative decadent young people and youths.” They failed. Klopfleisch’s file reports: “On 18.3.1981 a large number of soccer fans, in large part citizens of the GDR, assembled in front of [Bayern’s] hotel. . . . To restore order and safety, the Czech militia was compelled to clear the hotel entrance, through the use of truncheons, among other methods. The action of the militia . . . was filmed from the window of a hotel room by a male person using a cine-film camera.”

  It was Klopfleisch. The file quotes an extract from a letter he later wrote to a man in Munich, probably a Bayern official: “We hid our souvenirs. They searched us at the border again. It makes you feel like a bank robber. Isn’t it a disgrace, just because you go to the soccer to see Bayern you get checked like that.”

  Then Klopfleisch
and the Stasi began to meet head to head. The file contains an account of a “preventive conversation” that Stasi Lieutenant Hoyer held with Klopfleisch on December 12, 1981.

  The file reports: “K. arrived punctually, and, so he stated, by public transport, as he does not use his car in this weather [snow/ice].” He was allowed to speak, and did so “in an emotional manner that is founded in his character.” He demanded to know why his identity card had been confiscated: it stopped him from traveling abroad. Told to calm down, he raised the topic of soccer, and said “that this was his hobby and was accepted as such by his family. He had gone to Prague for the match.” He complained to Hoyer that he had been unable to buy tickets for Dynamo Berlin vs. Vfb Stuttgart. “He claimed that he could not explain this. He asked whether he would be allowed to go to the match even if he did find a ticket. It was pointed out to him that his own behavior would decide this. He replied that he was not a hooligan and condemned their actions, he therefore did not understand why his identity card had been taken away while other troublemakers still had theirs. He mentioned M., who lives at . . . , who is well-known in this respect. He asked whether he was not being confused with M. With regard to a possible match between Bayern Munich and Dynamo Dresden, he stated that for that, too, he would not officially receive tickets. But he claimed he knew the soccer player . . . of Bayern Munich, and if he wrote to him, would be given his tickets. It was then suggested to him that in such a case he should phone and consult Stasi Lieutenant Hoyer, at telephone number 5639289.”