Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  Then Klopfleisch began to sulk: “This did not appeal to him at all, he stated that in that case he would lose all pleasure and interest in the match. He already had the impression of being under control.”

  Other “conversations” followed. Klopfleisch told me: “In the file they call them ‘conversations,’ as if we were sitting in a nice room and they were saying, ‘So, Mr. Klopfleisch, what do you think of that?’ Really it was awful. I felt like a hunted animal. Once or twice I was stuck in a cell no bigger than the corner of this sofa,” he pointed. “Each time there was a different interrogator. I suppose they wanted to see if I’d tell each one a different story, but that’s just my guess. I have no idea. I never knew exactly what they wanted to find out, and whenever I asked, the interrogator shouted, “We ask the questions here!” He hesitated, for in his West Berlin flat, his story seemed barely plausible.

  “They always wanted to know who else was in it with me. I made a point of never giving them any names. They probably knew everything anyway, but I wanted them to be sure that they wouldn’t get any information out of me. I always said, ‘Nothing will ever change in the East, you won’t change people’s minds, just please let me out of the GDR because I can’t bear it anymore.’ ” “K. possesses a politically labile stance,” the Stasi found.

  What was it that had made him such an enemy of the system? “I don’t know. My grandfather was an anti-Nazi, and he always used to say how terrible the GDR was, so from when I was young I was hearing someone say that. But otherwise, I really don’t know. I knew the West was richer but I didn’t care about that. I just wanted to be able to read what I liked, to see what I liked, to hear what I liked.”

  Sometimes he was imprisoned when a Western side came to play in the GDR. “They even locked me up when Schmidt, who was then the West German Chancellor, visited East Berlin in 1981. I suppose they thought I’d go to the airport and wave a German flag or something stupid like that. It was hard enough as it was to get tickets for matches against Western teams. The tickets used to go to Party members—otherwise the whole stadium would have been cheering the Western side. Against Hamburger SV, to make absolutely sure, the tickets were handed out to the comrades just an hour before the match. We always got in anyhow, because most Communists hated soccer, and they’d sell their seats to us.” He mimed an idiotic Party member being talked into giving up his ticket.

  He was arrested again in 1985. At Czechoslovakia vs. West Germany, he had presented a toy Berlin Bear, the symbol of both halves of the city, to the West German manager, Franz Beckenbauer, and the Stasi had watched him do it. “They stopped my car at the border on the way back and searched it for five hours. They even took the wheel caps off—and they found the photo of me with Beckenbauer.” He showed it to me: a few steps behind Klopfleisch, Beckenbauer and the bear, beneath the “Restaurace” sign, an unidentified woman stares into the lens, and we briefly pondered whether she might be the spy.

  The Stasi took away the soccer souvenirs he had bought in Prague, but noted that “there were no signs of criminal smuggling. K. stated during the control that he was a passionate collector of such things. He said he considered the control to be harassment, and claimed that he had not seen the likes of it previously.” Klopfleisch never grasped what it was to live in a totalitarian state: for no particular reason, he always assumed that standards of decency and common sense would apply. Then, he told me, “they questioned me, shouting at me, and I could see they were going to throw me in jail. So I said, ‘Leave me alone or I’ll call my friend Franz.’ Naturally I barely knew Beckenbauer, but this worried them. ‘Maybe,’ they thought, ‘this man really is a friend of the Teamchef,’ which is what they called him. ‘It will be all over the Western papers,’ I told them. They were afraid to take the risk, and in the end they let me go.”

  It was a Stasi principle to tail West Germans who were in touch with East Germans, and I found in Klopfleisch’s file a “Request for Information of the Person of” a West German named “Franz,” resident in Kitzbühel, Austria. Every German knows that that is where Beckenbauer lives, but because the law says that no third persons mentioned in the Stasi files can be identified, the Western bureaucrats in charge of the files have crossed out the surname. I did not find the information that the Stasi gathered on Beckenbauer.

  Klopfleisch was arrested again the next year, just before the World Cup in Mexico, for sending a good-luck telegram to the West German team. “The Stasi asked, ‘How dare you wish the Class Enemy good luck?’ and I told them, ‘Soccer in this country of yours is no better than in Iceland or Luxembourg.’ ‘Will you stand by that statement?’ they screamed, and I said, ‘I’ll sign it if you like.’ Look, East Germany were rubbish! They only got 5,000 people watching the national team, and even then they had to bus in kids who would have watched anything.”

  I was getting ready to leave when Klopfleisch’s son Ralf came in and sat down beside his father. Now in his early twenties, Ralf forfeited the regime’s trust at the age of nine by telling his teacher that his hero was the Bayern striker Karl-Heinz Rummenigge. Rummenigge was a “class enemy,” whose uniform Ralf acquired years later. Professor Scherer, President of Bayern Munich, had arrived at the Klopfleisch flat in East Berlin and had begun to undress. “What’s this?” Klopfleisch had thought—but Scherer was wearing Rummenigge’s Bayern uniform underneath his suit. He had come through customs in it, and he gave it to Ralf.

  Ralf grew into a promising soccer player, and at 15 was playing for Dynamo colts and captaining the East Berlin Youth team. Then, at a compulsory Military Defense Training Camp, he fell and tore some ligaments in his knee. Initially he was refused first aid, and later an operation (“because we were ‘enemies of the state’ ”) and he had to retire from soccer. He has never played since. After Klopfleisch told the story Ralf walked out of the room again. “He used to be so happy,” Klopfleisch told me. “We used to laugh at the East together. I always thought they tried to play sport like a machine, so we used to shout, “It’s the balls, you have to play with them!” He had found in his file a record of a Stasi decision: “The boy will not be taken away from his parents.”

  The GDR dumped its dissidents in the West. In 1986 the Klopfleisches applied for visas to emigrate, and three years later their request was granted. The Stasi had chosen the moment with care: Klopfleisch’s mother was on her deathbed. “I begged the Stasi to let me stay for another couple of days. The doctor had told me that my mother had a few hours to live. I told the Stasi, and they said, “A few hours, we know. Either you leave today, or never.” So I went and five days later she died. I wasn’t allowed back for her funeral.” The Klopfleisch family spent their first year in the West in a refugee camp.

  It was just Klopfleisch’s luck that having spent his whole life in the GDR, the Wall came down months after he emigrated. But at last he could watch Hertha at home. “When I lived in the East I suppose I had a lot of illusions about Hertha. I thought they were a great club, and I have been disappointed. The Wall fell on November 9, 1989. Hertha’s next league match was at home to Wattenscheid, and there were 59,000 people in the stadium! In the second division! The whole of East Berlin had come across. Then, that Monday, we read in the papers that Hertha had invited the directors of Dynamo Berlin and Union Berlin to the match. All those Communists and Stasi chiefs! Because believe me, the big directors, managers and players in the East were all in the Party, whether they admit it now or not. I was a steward for the match against Wattenscheid, and when I saw the Party chiefs march past on the way to their free seats I thought, ‘We fought and suffered for Hertha, and then they go and invite the bosses.’ Hertha announced at the press conference that these people had been at the game, as if it were something to be proud of. That’s why there were only 16,000 at the next match. I immediately resigned my membership, though I still go and watch Hertha. I think they’re the only club in Berlin. Even people who never watch them always check their results. Blau Weiss plays better soccer, but they
’re just not Hertha, are they?”

  The balance, he agreed, was sad. “I turn 43 this year. I spent 41 years of my life in the GDR, and now it feels like wasted time, though we lived then, and had fun sometimes. And you know, it was a real consolation that West Germany was so successful. They always beat Eastern teams. That meant a lot to us.”

  CHAPTER 4

  THE BALTICS WANT TO BE IN AMERICA

  BERLIN TO VILNIUS IS a 22-hour train journey. We chugged through Poland, stopped in Belorussia, where two small boys with a plastic bag got on and rifled the carriages, and after about 20 hours, crossed the border into Lithuania. I was standing in the corridor with two Germans, chatting desultorily, when a young Lithuanian outside threw a rock against the window at which we were standing. The glass failed to break in our faces, and eventually we reached Vilnius.

  Vilnius, Lithuania. Vilnius has a million inhabitants, a crumbling fifteenth-century center, and crumbling twentieth-century suburbs. Yet by Soviet standards Lithuania was rich, and it was the first of the USSR’s republics to gain independence. (When I arrived, in August 1992, most foreign ambassadors were still living in hotel rooms.) The other Baltic states, Latvia and Estonia, had also become free on time to enter the American World Cup, and I had come to see the first two World Cup qualifying matches ever to be played in this part of the world: Latvia vs. Lithuania, and Estonia vs. Switzerland.

  In Vilnius, I first made for the office of the Sajudis movement, opposite the cathedral. Sajudis led the drive for independence, and the movement has since become a political party. It was the largest in Lithuania, and a general election was at hand, but as soon as I walked into the office and identified myself as an English soccer journalist I was taken in to see the big boss, the Sajudis executive secretary Andrius Kubilius. Even that was as nothing compared to the young Norwegian tourist who was brought to meet President Landsbergis. Westerners are big shots in the Baltics.

  Soccer and basketball games, said Kubilius, had been vital in the struggle for independence. Often, after Zalgiris Vilnius played a Russian team, the home fans would march from the stadium carrying torches and singing folk songs. In the center of town they would meet militiamen with batons—“bananas,” the Lithuanians call them. These were virtually the only nationalist protests in the country until the late 1980s. Only when Gorbachev took power and people became freer to speak did sport cease to matter quite so much. “When Sajudis became strong, sport came in second place,” Kubilius said. Until then, he explained, large numbers of Soviet citizens could come together and shout what they pleased only at a sports match. The players never joined in, but the Zalgiris soccer players would always first wave to the fans at the southern end of the stadium, where the most vocal Lithuanians sat. “The demonstrations had no consequences, of course,” Kubilius admitted sadly. He was sorry when I ran out of questions, and not just because he liked talking sport. Lithuanians love “Europe,” which they constantly say they want to “rejoin,” and they crave for it to notice them. It matters that a lot of Westerners have never heard of Lithuania: businesses will only start to trade with a nation if they know it exists; tourists will only visit on the same premise, and should the Russian Army march into Lithuania again, Western governments will feel more pressure to act if the Western public knows about Lithuania.

  Sport can help. Days before I arrived, Lithuania’s basketball team had won the bronze medal at the Barcelona Olympics, thus earning more foreign TV coverage in a month than President Landsbergis had managed all year. Nerijus Maliukevicius of Lithuanian Weekly (published in English) told me he had had three foreign visitors in recent months: a journalist each from Newsweek and the San Francisco Chronicle, both come to ask about Lithuanian basketball, and me. “Everyone comes here for sport,” he concluded. When I asked him about the old demonstrations, he answered hastily, “I participated,” and then qualified this to, “I saw. I took my son to see. But then the demonstration would finish, and what could you do? So we would go home.”

  I left Vilnius the next day. Lithuania was playing Latvia away, in Riga, and I got a lift north in Matvejus Frismanas’ Volkswagen van. A Lithuanian with a Volkswagen van is like a Westerner with a private jet: Frismanas is a mega-rich businessman, and also a Baltic calypso character. His passion is soccer, and he told me that he was a director of the Lithuanian side, though his English business card read, more grandly, “Manager of the national team.” Frismanas was a bright man.

  A Lithuanian hulk drove the van for him, and there were two other passengers: the one Frismanas’ brother-in-law, a math teacher by trade, and the other a soccer reporter who had been the sole Lithuanian journalist to accompany the soccer team to Northern Ireland. It had been the country’s first ever World Cup match, but the other newspapers had not had the money to send anyone.

  Frismanas and his brother-in-law were Jewish, and they quickly established that I was too. “I can never forget,” said the brother-in-law in a mixture of Yiddish, German and English, “where my uncles and aunts and grandparents are. In the Lithuanian earth! And it was the Lithuanians who put them there, not the Germans.” Frismanas was the sponsor of Maccabi Vilnius, a club which had been Jewish until the war. And now? “Now, only the money is Jewish.”

  We did a stint on the road, and then Frismanas signaled to the hulk and we stopped for a feast. We had brought our own vodka, it seemed, which we augmented with shashliks bought from a peasant. The journalist handed me a cup of vodka, persuaded me to down it “as a symbol,” and then constantly refilled it. I drank lots of symbols. “The Russians taught us to drink,” Frismanas lamented. “The Russians.”

  Guards with machine guns were waiting at the Latvian border. Frismanas jumped out of the van, ran to the guards before they could come to us and handed them a small Lithuanian Olympic flag. He talked to them for a minute or so, the one guard holding the flag, others emerging from the customs shed to stare at Frismanas, and then he trotted back to the car and ordered the hulk to drive on. What had he told them? That they were lucky, he replied. “I said, ‘Normally we beat you, but Lithuania does not have all its players fit, so we will draw.’ ”

  Riga, Latvia. I had a slight cold, which worried my companions greatly. We drove straight to the Hotel Riga, where the squad was staying, and went in search of the team doctor, whom we found in a double room surrounded by the entire Lithuanian squad. It was easy to tell which were the stars who played in Austria and which players were still with local clubs: the two men with swish haircuts lying on the beds being massaged were plainly at Austria Vienna, while the boys sitting on the floor with long unkempt hair had to be on a couple of pounds a week.

  The doctor was as concerned as my friends, and gave me German pills for my cold. They tasted nice, and I continued to take them after the cold ended. While I was in the Baltics they were often the best food I had all day.

  Frismanas and his brother-in-law had asked me whether I felt like interviewing Lithuania’s real manager, Algimantas Liubinskas. “This will be no problem,” they assured me, and it emerged that Liubinskas was Frismanas’ business partner. “But not to put in the newspaper,” they added.

  The business partner was in his room, wearing a shirt marked “Indiana Refereeing Course” and watching pop videos on MTV with the venerable uniform manager. What kind of a team was Lithuania? “The Lithuanian temperament is not very strong.” How had the tiny country, in its first important match since the Hitler-Stalin pact, managed a 2-2 draw in Belfast? “Northern Ireland did not play badly,” said Liubinskas, “but they did not know anything about us. We had videocassettes of their matches, but I think they thought, “Lithuania? Where’s that on the map?” We know British sides play through the air—we call it, “on the second floor,” and we were prepared for that. Though in fact,” he smiled, “they scored both their goals along the ground.” Liubinskas was better informed than the Lithuanian FA. The table of the World Cup group on their office wall calls Northern Ireland “Airija,” and Eire “S. Airija”: Ir
eland and Southern Ireland.

  The first World Cup match on Baltic soil was quite an occasion. For me, it was the first time I bought caviar sandwiches outside of a soccer ground. Otherwise, though hawkers around the stadium were selling warm German beer and Agatha Christies in Latvian, I limited myself to the match program with its incongruous picture of Diego Maradona on the cover. It cost eight pence: prices were a great joy to me in my first few days in the old USSR.

  The fans were wandering around in shirts with Western logos, any Western logos: one man’s shirt said “Royal Mail—Stoke on Trent—MLO.” No hooligans seemed to have turned up. A couple of hundred Lithuanian diehards with large beards carried flags and chanted “Lietuva!,” and were watched by policemen in Wellington boots.

  In the press room I spotted a VIP: the Danish manager Richard Möller-Nielsen. It was two months since his team had won the European Championships, and he was now in Riga to spy on his World Cup opponents. I found him surrounded by Lithuanian journalists and their feeble interpreter. Was it true that he had taken a break from repairing his house to win the championships? Möller-Nielsen grinned, but was keen to get the facts right: “I should have put in a new kitchen, but then we were called away to play in Sweden. But the kitchen is finished now. It took a long time. I had a professional decorator do it.” He fended off a question about Michael Laudrup, who was refusing to play for Denmark, and he said that Latvia and Lithuania would be difficult opponents. I thought he was just being polite, and maybe he thought so too, but 50 days later Denmark had drawn 0-0 in each country.

  The craze for Western emblems extended to the Latvian FA, who had tacked an enormous World Cup 1994 logo complete with American flag to one of the stands. The World Cup was a kind of mirage—both sides knew they would never actually get to America—but at least the logo clarified that this was not some sort of village match. A Lithuanian folk dance was performed on the pitch, and in this setting it was hardly embarrassing, as Morris dancing at Wembley might have been. The Lithuanian hard core clapped.