Nineteen seventy-two was an extraordinary year for the Federal Republic. Within months it not only staged an outstanding Olympics, but via an agreement with wartime allies over the status of West Berlin and a series of treaties with Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin, succeeded in bringing the spirit of global détente to bear on relations with its Eastern neighbors. Although most difficult to conclude, the final negotiations with the German Democratic Republic (GDR) contained an essential vagueness that allowed both sides to claim real gains and symbolic victories. While the GDR understood the treaty as a repudiation of German unity, the Federal Republic believed it had found a substitute for it. The former won “recognition” from the Federal Republic, entry alongside it into the UN in 1973, and, in the same year, a dramatic increase in diplomatic relations (up to seventy-nine states from only seventeen in 1969). The latter recognized the independence but not sovereignty of its Eastern rival, secured the status of Berlin, freed itself from cumbersome foreign policy constraints, and created a more open environment for trade and exchange.
In the second week of the Games, Brandt’s closest advisor on Ostpolitik, Egon Bahr, went to East Berlin for a crucial meeting with Honecker, and just two months later the chancellor led his party to its best ever election result in what was effectively a hard-fought referendum against the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) on the topic.1 It would be misleading, however, to read sport in 1972 and the immediately preceding years as a simple cipher for identificatory politics and emotions. The Munich Games might have coincided with the conclusion of Ostpolitik, but they were not a straightforward “Ostpolitik Olympics.” There are several reasons for this. First, although opinion polls in 1972 showed strong support for an acceptance of the fact of German division, they registered an equal unwillingness to recognize the GDR. Brandt drew this distinction punctiliously, even in the realm of sport and the Munich Games.2 Second, a long tradition of sports-political enmity between the Federal Republic and the GDR led to ingrained attitudes and modes of behavior which set their own agendas in the international arena. And third, the Federal Republic’s rapprochement with the GDR’s allies after 1969 threw East Berlin severely off course for the Games. These second and third factors rendered the relationship between sport and inter-German politics decidedly labyrinthine, and it is only when set against the background of almost two decades of feuding that they can be fully understood.
From as early as the 1950s, the two Germanys and the Olympic movement triangulated in a relation of angst and provocation. From the foundation of the Republic, Bonn was convinced that any recognition of its Eastern rival would delay reunification, and set out its stall as the sole representative of the German nation (Alleinvertretung). Diplomatically, it enforced its will around the world via the Hallstein doctrine, a Foreign Office policy (from 1955 onward) that threatened to break off relations with any country (bar the USSR) that recognized the GDR. States in need of trade and development aid proved particularly open to such reasoning and keen to enter financial bargaining. At the same time, the GDR pushed representational issues to the limits—provoking Bonn’s representatives over symbols and nomenclature wherever possible—and in the Middle East in particular, it became increasingly necessary to turn a blind eye to keep the scheme intact.3 Nonetheless, despite its growing expense and inherent contradictions, Hallstein remained a potent weapon of defense until the Social Democratic Party (SPD) came to power with its new agenda in 1969. With the exception of Cuba (1963) and a number of Arab states (after 1965), no third-world country assumed official relations with East Berlin until that point.4
It proved altogether more difficult, however, to transfer the success of Hallstein to the NGO world of international sport. Here, the visual ritual of competition supported by emblems, flags, and anthems accentuated the problem. It was one thing for West German diplomats to debate—and choose, if necessary, to ignore—the latest GDR peccadillo at a trade fair thousands of miles from home, but quite another to remain indifferent as East German colors glided up flag poles in stadiums around the world. Bonn insisted on the regulation of international paraphernalia—down to the size of badges on tracksuits—and viewed any flaunting of the rules as the thin end of the wedge. NATO lent support, particularly after the erection of the Berlin Wall, by threatening and imposing travel restrictions on GDR athletes as a deterrent against breaking the West’s strict protocols, while the Federal Republic kept its own house in order by declaring the flying of GDR flags and insignia a public order offense (1959). Host nations around the world came under pressure to exclude East German sports teams for minor breeches of convention, and the GDR often obliged by withdrawing, sometimes with their Eastern allies in tow, to great publicity effect.
Oddly, Bonn’s general obsession with symbols seemed to function positively for both parties: while the GDR manipulated them to “advance in tiny increments,” minor infringements permitted the Federal Republic to “register complaints with local governments . . . to demonstrate earnestness without invoking any heavy-handed threats about breaking diplomatic relations.”5 In other words, the fine print of Hallstein allowed both sides to articulate Cold War politics while keeping them in check. Sport, paradoxically, was a different kind of game—one in which the Federal Republic’s fixation with symbols left it exposed on two flanks. First, it was vulnerable to the “cat-and-mouse game” of permissible national emblems at international events, the GDR reveling in the ever-changing minutiae of the regulations and switching its badges, vests, and tracksuits to maximum annoyance at the eleventh hour.6 Second, it fell increasingly foul of decisions taken by NGOs that were beyond the reach of governmental influence.
While sports events of all kinds—from skydiving to junior table-tennis—in all parts of the world were affected by feuds over German representation, the symbolladen arena of the Olympics provided the main theater of contestation. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) struggled with the “querelles allemandes” for over a decade and a half. In 1951 in Vienna, it recognized the National Olympic Committee of the Federal Republic as the “NOK für Deutschland” and rejected the GDR’s application for membership. Only the West Germans, themselves excluded from the first postwar Games in London 1948, were allowed to compete at Helsinki 1952. The IOC revised its decision in Paris in 1955, provisionally recognizing the GDR as the “NOK für Ostdeutschland” on the condition that it form a joint team with the West Germans—an arrangement that lasted for three Games from 1956 to 1964. In Madrid in 1965, the IOC crossed the Rubicon and granted the GDR full rights as a geographical area with a separate team for Mexico 1968, albeit still within the joint framework. At the session held immediately prior to those Games, it completed the process, finally redesignating the GDR as the “NOK der DDR” (or “Deutschland-DDR” for the purposes of competition) and permitting a fully independent team for the next Olympics in Munich.
In the course of this complicated process, long-suffering West German sports functionaries were torn between the contradictory visions of their governmental sponsors in Bonn and sporting masters at the IOC. NATO reacted indignantly to the notion of a joint team for 1956, and Adenauer and his foreign minister, Brentano, were equally opposed, not least when the GDR changed its flag in 1959 and the IOC forced both sides to accept a neutral replacement (the five Olympic rings superimposed on black, red and gold) and a nonpartisan anthem (from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony).7 Paradoxically, the erection of the Berlin Wall forced Adenauer into a volte-face on the Olympic issue. As the German Sports Association (DSB) responded to Berlin mayor Willy Brandt’s call to retaliate by banning bilateral competition (Düsseldorf Decree 1961), the joint team, which was unpopular with the West German public, ironically grew in importance for the government. Daume’s proposal of separate teams for the 1964 Games under one flag (which previously would have gone some way to placating Adenauer) was flatly rejected by the Ministry of the Interior.
FIGURE 17. GDR team at the opening ceremony (photo: Friedrich Gahlbeck, Bild 183-L0827-207, courtesy of Bundesarchiv)
The pragmatist in Daume quickly tired of the niggling controversies that plagued the united team. The Summer Games in Tokyo (1964) and their winter equivalent in Grenoble (1968) required fourteen rounds of negotiation between the two NOCs, ninety-six conferences between individual federations and sixty play-off tournaments to determine which athletes would participate.8 Perhaps more than any other sector of public life, Olympic sport confronted its functionaries with the unadulterated fact of German division and the difficulties of dealing with governmental tensions on both sides of the border. Daume often quoted Karl Jaspers, the philosopher who a year before the Wall controversially stated that the Germans should renounce their futile hopes of coming together as one nation again.9 But such progressive ideas cut as little ice in Lausanne as they did in Bonn. At the IOC, Brundage’s love of all things German and vision of Olympism as separate from politics, but contributing to the solution of political problems, gave him grand designs of bringing about reunification single-handedly. When approached about the possibility of Berlin’s hosting the 1968 Olympics, for example, he gushed with world-political ambition: “This would really be sensational and might do more than Kennedy and Khrushchev, together, for the peace of the world.”10 On another occasion, he claimed: “The creation of a United German Team and its continuance through six Olympic Games. . . has been a great victory over politics that illustrates the power of the Olympic Movement dramatically.” For good measure, he would underscore such arguments by citing the thwarted boycott of 1936 when “the Olympic idea proved itself stronger than the forces which afterward led to the great World War.”11 It would take a massive shift in world opinion and a serious threat to his own hold on power for Brundage to abandon his apodictic position on the German question.
After the building of the Wall, the adherence in Bonn and Lausanne to the chimera of East-West cooperation in sport placed Daume in an awkward double-bind. Contributing greatly to this was the East Germans’ rapid mastery of Olympic discourse. The GDR had entered the movement in the early 1950s on the coattails of the Soviets, who embraced international and Olympic competition for the same reasons as other totalitarian regimes before the Second World War: a belief in “modernity and social improvement,” which they shared with the IOC, and the desire to showcase the superiority of their system through athletic prowess.12 The Soviets soon perfected the language of Olympism, their representative Konstantin Andrianow railing at the IOC Executive Board against “the forces hostile to sports traditions and friendships among athletes,” which he deemed to be “turn[ing] sports into a political weapon.”13 Soviet adherence to the Olympic creed was absolute. While by the 1960s the West Germans cherished the Olympics merely as one of those “islands of peace where political calm is maintained as much as possible,” the Soviets remained true to the totalizing vision of the founder and his loyal successors.14 As late as 1980, at the opening ceremony of the Moscow Games, this idealizing notion of Olympic tradition was writ large when “a group of marchers dressed as ancient Greeks, some astride a chariot, entered the stadium, [a] giant card section presented a picture of the Parthenon, [and an] announcer offered a thoroughly positive reading of classical history” quite alien to Soviet historiography of the time.15 In the 1960s, Brundage’s selective reading of world history led him to tell Andrianow that Karl Marx offered “an excellent summary of Olympic philosophy.”16
The GDR was never far behind. Realizing the need to play the old-boy networks of the IOC, it replaced Kurt Edel, a former KGB agent, at the head of its National Olympic Committee with Heinz Schöbel, an urbane Leipzig publisher who proved more to Brundage’s liking. In 1966, Schöbel composed a history of the Olympic Games that, like the Soviet model from which it took its lead, was replete with ideological inconsistencies.17 In this account, the ancient Olympics represented “highpoints in the glorious development of culture and democracy” for “free citizens” imbued with a “basic humanistic conviction,” and formed the ideal forerunner of modern sport “in the realization of its humanistic form in socialist society.” De Coubertin’s legacy, Schöbel noted, had been to preserve these ideals for the sake of “social change” and to make sport “democratic and international.”18 Brundage supplied a preface for the first, and indeed several subsequent editions, and the work helped earn Schöbel the GDR’s first, much-coveted seat on the IOC in 1966.
On a personal level, the East Germans could curry favor with Brundage as well as their Western counterparts. They appealed to his tastes by stressing “the close connection of sports and art” in the GDR, flattering him with requests to show a film on his art collection at the Pergamon Museum in East Berlin.19 In 1968, Schöbel presented the IOC president with a leather-bound Festschrift (Die vier Dimensionen des Avery Brundage, The Four Dimensions of Avery Brundage), quite possibly one of the most hypocritical works to come out of the GDR. In it Brundage, like de Coubertin and the ancient Greeks before him, emerged through a kaleidoscope of propaganda as “a talented youngster characterized by [his] ability to work hard, tenacity, determination”—as someone who had overcome the odds, practicing by “adapting an iron ring” and throwing “heavy stones.”20 Most strikingly, this latter-day Siegfried’s insistence “on strict respect for Olympic principles in [the] Berlin Olympic Games in 1936” was equated with his “remarkable” support for the “affiliation of the Soviet Union with the IOC.” Brundage, who had actively followed the book’s progress, ordered 750 copies from Leipzig to distribute to admiring former classmates from the University of Illinois.
The Soviet bloc’s charm offensive put Daume under pressure. The West Germans matched or bettered the GDR, present for present,21 publication for publication.22 But with the East Germans playing a shrewd game and his own government showing an inflexibility that was going out of fashion in the international arena, Daume needed to draw on all his diplomatic skills. Portrayals of the West German NOC president have often depicted him both at odds with the federal government’s determination to maintain a united German team in the 1960s and at the same time devastated at the GDR’s eventual recognition by the IOC in 1965.23 There has been little reflection on the inherent contradiction in these positions, but, on closer inspection, they give the lie to Daume’s tactics during the course of the decade. Daume was no stranger to well-meaning duplicity on the German question. At the turn of the year 1956, he had confidentially informed the minister of the interior, Gerhard Schröder, that in sports terms the GDR had “in effect unfortunately already” become “a sovereign state.”24 On his election to the IOC a year later, however, he assured Brundage of his continued support on the “great task” of the united team, noting how the Olympic idea had “broken through iron and paper curtains” and forced men “to look into their brother’s heart.”25 While Daume’s stance was basically incompatible with that of Brundage and the West German government, he paid lip service to both to maintain his personal platform. Faced with the almost certain prospect of his two powerful masters eventually losing the struggle to contain East German ambitions, his twin strategy of protest and compliance, although exhausting, left his power intact.
In the particularly fraught run-up to the 1964 Games, Daume’s dual approach was much in evidence. On the one hand, the West German sports establishment was growing increasingly disheartened at Brundage’s implacability over the German issue. Daume’s desire for separate teams caused dismay at IOC headquarters,26 with Brundage—as described even by his old friend Liselott Diem on her return from a visit to Chicago—behaving as a “jock” who “had no interest in anything else.”27 On the other hand, Daume went out of his way to assure the president of his commitment to a united squad.28 These contradictions continued in Tokyo itself, where—distancing himself from the West German embassy and carrying a handgun after threats on his life—he announced to anyone willing to listen, “that it was all over for the unified German team.”29 At the IOC session just before the Games, however, he proclaimed—in contradiction of the actual experience of those concerned—that “the athletes from both parts of Germany got on famously,” and lavished praise on the joint team as a resounding “triumph for the Olympic idea.”30 Back in Bonn, he also convinced the Ministry of the Interior of his continued belief in the all-German cause.31
Despite confessing that the IOC, given the opportunity, would recognize the GDR by a margin of four to one,32 Daume covered his back by inviting the federal government to set up a steering committee in preparation for the decisive ballot in Madrid in October 1965.33 As before the 1964 session, when Andrianow had been expected to force a vote,34 the Foreign Office (supported by representatives of the DSB, the NOC, the national sports press, the Ministry of the Interior and the government’s press and information office) went into overdrive, instructing forty of its embassies to exert pressure on IOC members via the highest possible authority in their host countries.35 At the same time, East Berlin pursued a similar course of action.36 The West Germans flew Alfredo O. Inciarte (the IOC member from Uruguay) to Europe on full expenses and provided a personal budget of DM 2,000 to exert his influence;37 Daume was granted DM 150,000 to finance an extensive “invitation campaign” and traveled himself, just weeks after Schöbel, to Mexico, where he presented President General Clarke Flores with an antique Bierkrug and the original score of Richard Strauss’s Olympic anthem from the 1936 Games.38 A month before the vote, despite the Foreign Office’s studied optimism,39 Daume knew there was little chance of victory.40 Secure in this knowledge, he went through the motions of pleasing the government, sending a legal expert’s report to all IOC members and honing a speech for Madrid that would surpass the rhetorical brio of his efforts in Tokyo.41 In the event, the IOC listened, complained about the overt politicization of sport on the part of the West German government, and—relieved at last to rid itself of the endless “querelles allemandes”—voted by an overwhelming majority to grant the GDR a team of its own.42
Within three weeks, Daume had approached Hans-Jochen Vogel with a proposal to bring the 1972 Games to Munich.43 The astonishing rapidity of the West Germans’ decision led their East German counterparts to surmise that Bonn had demanded immediate action to “regain lost prestige.”44 While entirely plausible, the GDR’s analysis was nonetheless incorrect. Daume was later wont to recount that he decided to bid in Madrid, realizing how much the country now needed to cement friendships and allegiances.45 There is certainly some truth in this explanation, but it neglects the important fact that the idea of hosting an Olympics in Berlin was still circulating in the course of 1965. Brundage had been “questioned about the possibility” while in Europe that May,46 and had irritated the East Germans in August by dangling the prospect to dissuade them from pushing for independence.47 It is also likely that—even indirectly—a good deal of Daume’s pre-Madrid campaign was devoted to the Munich “plan B.” Ambitious to climb the IOC ladder, hosting the Games in Germany would have featured strongly in his long-term strategy. Appearing to have lost on an apparently cherished point of principle in Madrid, thus, did no harm in amassing a potential sympathy vote when it came to bidding for the big prize itself.
When considering the viability of the bid at home, the German question did not overly trouble the initial discussants. Vogel raised it with Daume (along with finance),48 but was advised by his party leader Brandt that awkward questions of protocol might well be resolved by 1972.49 Chancellor Erhard, at his first meeting with the two lead organizers, made no mention of the issue,50 and the prospective bid went through the cabinet meeting of 2 December 1965 equally unimpeded.51 Six days later, minister of the interior Paul Lücke assured the burgeoning bid team “the federal government [would] do everything in its power to support the realization of the 1972 Olympics [and] create all prerequisites for their undisturbed hosting.”52 Yet this soon transpired to be a rash promise, one that would jeopardize the Games during and after the bid. In November and December 1965, Erhard might have prioritized the prestige-bringing benefits of the Olympics to the Federal Republic’s worldwide image above the intricacies of the German question. But by Easter the following year, with the government struggling to keep its pledge and the Eastern bloc agitating against the erstwhile “capital of the movement,” he would find himself backed into a corner.
Munich’s bid and the political problems that trailed in its wake might not have arisen at all if two key ministers—Vice Chancellor Erich Mende (FDP, Intra-German Relations), and Gerhard Schröder (CDU, Foreign Office)—had been present at cabinet on 2 December. Neither, as their general record and subsequent interventions suggest, would have shared the chancellor’s enthusiasm. Both had introduced important policies toward the East, but retained vital caveats in their outlook. In his first three years in office, Mende had begun what would become the “policy of small steps” under Brandt and Bahr, implementing a number of measures that improved relations between Bonn and East Berlin and alleviated some of the impact of the Wall on the German population. Yet despite the FDP’s general hostility toward Hallstein, he advocated it fiercely for the hosting of international events on home soil. Schröder, one of Erhard’s closest allies in the cabinet, followed an even harder line. Although his “policy of movement” established trade missions in Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, and Sofia, these advances were underpinned by a strict rejection of negotiations with the GDR, even at subgovernmental level.53 Although remembered for steering a new direction in foreign policy, unlike Brandt and Bahr, he was not yet ready to accept the status quo of German division. For Schröder, this relationship represented a zero-sum game, in which each side’s gains were bought at the cost of the other.54 In the aftermath of Madrid, it is unlikely the foreign minister would have considered the prospect of an independent East German team in Munich a price worth paying.
As early as January 1966, when the IOC began to seek assurances about the rights of East German athletes, it became apparent that the cabinet had bitten off more than it could chew. The Ministry of the Interior dragged its heels until March and then formulated an evasive reply, stating that it would “do all in its power to . . . create, in every respect, such conditions as [would] make it possible to arrange [the 1972 Olympics] without disturbance and . . . endeavor fully to meet all the requests of the IOC on the basis of the regulations of the IOC presently in force.”55 The IOC was immediately wise to Bonn’s get-out-of-jail card, which aimed to protect the Federal Republic against any enhancement of the GDR’s status before 1972. In line with the Olympic Charter that forbade discrimination on grounds of race, religion, or politics, and indeed in keeping with similar assurances in Munich’s bid document,56 Lausanne pressed for specific guarantees.57 The issue had become acute again after the GDR’s dramatic withdrawal from the World Biathlon Championships in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in early February 1966, when Bavarian police surrounded athletes for wearing state insignia on their training uniforms.58 Having been made to look “like the last cold warriors”—as Daume wrote to Lücke—the bid team sensed its chances “ebbing away.”59 Certainly, the Eastern bloc’s anti-Munich campaign had gone into overdrive. Rumors circulated that Andrianow would be attacking the fragile sporting status of West Berlin at the IOC session in Rome, and—in stark contrast to their cordial discussions over bilateral sports relations the previous year in Moscow—the Soviets ignored Daume’s attempts to arrange a private meeting.60 While Daume waited in vain for a visa,61 Andrianow highlighted cases of West German discrimination in the press.62 The East German Communist Party’s (SED) secretariat for international relations also planned to publicize details of the Garmisch incident around the world.63
The bid team waited in vain for an unambiguous letter from the government, but it did not arrive. With several ministries—Mende’s and Schröder’s to the fore—holding fast to the temporal qualification,64 the Foreign Office fretted that the Madrid formula (separate teams with common insignia) could entail “a form of national surrender” with “far-reaching psychological consequences.”65 While the government would gladly insist on Madrid regulations when persuading the organizers of international competitions to remove GDR paraphernalia from their stadia, the idea of flying the neutral German Olympic flag at its own showcase event six years later was hardly appealing. By April, a clear gap was opening up between the concessions that the Land of Bavaria and the city of Munich were prepared to make and policies the federal government continued to view as nonnegotiable. While Munich and Bavaria conceded to demands from the Eastern bloc about the behavior of populous émigré associations in their region,66 the Ministry of the Interior refused to expunge the critical caveat from its second guarantee.67
With “the Russians firing from all barrels,” Daume became frantic. In a telex to Erhard he contended that Canada and the United States, both members of NATO, had previously provided such guarantees—and passed on, “for its oddity value,” Brundage’s remark that even Hitler had given written assurances in 1936 “that Jews would be admitted to the German Olympic team.”68 The cabinet remained unmoved—Lücke stressing that the Madrid ruling represented the utter limit of acceptability, and Mende arguing he was unwilling to concede “even if Munich’s bid failed on this account.”69 Erhard was hemmed in and had little choice but to ignore Daume’s pleas from the Italian capital.70
However, the loophole in Olympic protocol and gnawing concerns in some ministries about a likely public backlash were to save the day. Exploiting the fact that governments communicate with the IOC via prospective host cities and that the German declaration required a translation, Vogel and Daume prepared to doctor the English version of Lücke’s blanket statement from 8 December.71 Following Mende’s advice,72 the chancellery telexed Daume with a statement that continued to underline the federal government’s “unqualified right to assert its sole right to speak for the entire German people,”73 although this was withdrawn on the advice of the Foreign Office and the German ambassador in Rome.74 At any rate, Lücke’s ministry had been softening since the cabinet meeting, and after several frenetic days of negotiation, Daume and Vogel were finally permitted to utter the necessary guarantee orally.
To the surprise and delight of the West German public, Munich won the Games. But the government was having serious doubts and would come under intense pressure from the Eastern bloc to repeat its reluctant promise in writing. Over the next two and a half years, the letter required by the IOC and the GDR’s final thrust for full Olympic recognition would push Bonn to the brink.
The IOC sessions in Madrid and Rome—to borrow Schröder’s analogy—had created a zero-sum game. It was not just that the Federal Republic’s victory in Rome cancelled out the GRD’s in Madrid. Rather, each country’s triumph now contained the seeds of its own undoing. The Federal Republic had won the right to project itself via the 1972 Olympics, but also had more to lose should it go to the line to beat the GDR’s lunge for status. Similarly, East Germany had gained the right to compete with a separate team at the 1968 Games, but the proviso that this team share a flag and anthem with the Federal Republic gave the West Germans a neatly defined default position to which they would refer if event organizers could no longer be persuaded to ban the GDR flag outright. Despite the bitter blow, the West German cabinet had soon capitalized on the opportunity even before the end of 1965, recommending the adoption of the “Madrid solution” in all cases “in which [their] claim to sole representation . . . [could] not prevail.”75 The GDR interpreted the new situation in exactly the same fashion, putting plans in place to counter any move by the Federal Republic to turn the “great progress” made in Madrid to its disadvantage.76 Thus, Bonn and East Berlin were set for a further round of controversial encounters over Hallstein, with Madrid providing the rules of engagement and Munich as a vulnerable collateral asset. Only the DSB took the Madrid decision at face value, voting within weeks to lift its Düsseldorf Declaration of 1961 and normalize intra-German sports relations. Having achieved its goal of (at least partial) Olympic recognition, however, the GDR had little interest in playing real games with its neighbor—and the number of contacts remained a fraction of their pre-1961 total.77 While West German sport representatives genuinely wanted a fresh start, neither government was remotely bothered.
Despite the global thaw of the mid-1960s, a deeper freeze had set in between East and West Germany. Erhard’s inaugural speech, a diplomatic disaster in the Middle East in the winter of 1964 and 1965 (chapter 7), and fears among conservatives about the potential consequences of the GDR’s economic upturn had led to an increasingly zealous implementation of Hallstein policies.78 In early 1966, the state secretary in the Foreign Office, Karl Carstens, deemed the GDR—incorrectly, as it turned out—to be “progressing unstoppably” and urged the government to “continue the struggle” for “every partial victory.”79 The year continued, therefore, in a blaze of activity designed to show the Federal Republic “was not becoming reconciled to the existence of a second German state.”80 Complaints were made on petty issues, such as the diplomatic plates on the East German consul’s car in Yemen and the flying of GDR flags at the Algiers trade fair. In this climate, the DSB was also to feel a chill wind. Although its willingness to engage with the East was in keeping with the public mood—a survey in early 1967 found 83 percent of the population in favor of intensifying cross-border sports relations, 67 percent stating that the GDR should be allowed to fly its flag and sing its anthem in Munich’s Olympic Stadium81—cabinet discussions in the autumn of 1966 put the national sports body under greater pressure than before.
Flag and anthem protocol at the European track-and-field championships in Budapest in August lit the government’s touch-paper.82 Despite assurances from the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) that the Madrid formula would be applied, winning athletes from the GDR were honored with full national colors. With the West German team refusing to boycott the event as requested, the government had been forced to look on impotently. The cabinet was gravely concerned that such incidents could multiply and force the Federal Republic into accepting the GDR flag in Munich. Some argued the Games should be given back immediately (under the pretense of financial strain), others that funding be withheld for the foreseeable future. Although neither suggestion was pursued, a feeling took hold that sports resources should become dependent on their recipients’ support for “the Federal Republic’s vital political interests.” Word spread of CDU discontent and rumors circulated that the IOC might transfer the 1972 Olympics to Stockholm.83
In subsequent weeks, the Foreign Office drafted a perspicacious paper on the problems of enforcing Hallstein in international sport. This recognized, first, that despite NATO’s recent commitment to flag and anthem codes, member states were already applying regulations less strictly than desired. Second, it noted the unwillingness of Western governments to interfere with international federations, sport being considered separate from politics but valued for its galvanizing effect among those levels of society “particularly inclined to emotional forms of response and with little grasp of political matters.” And third, it lamented, while sports officials in the Eastern bloc were nourished on a direct political drip, Bonn held little sway over its own representatives who viewed the political aspect of international sport as the prerogative and duty of governments alone.84
The most intriguing aspect about the Foreign Office’s analysis—apart from its envy of “totalitarian states”—is its failure to register any notion of success. Neither the Federal Republic’s victories in keeping the GDR at bay diplomatically, nor the GDR’s advances in the world of sport play any part in its interpretation. The first absence explains the narrow line the West German government continued to take generally in 1966. In retrospect, as scholarship has shown, Hallstein (although frayed at the edges) clearly permitted Bonn to keep the “East German regime . . . on the fringes of international life precisely as long as [it] wanted.”85 At the time, however, the government remained uncertain about its own success and increased its Hallstein measures out of a sense of desperation. The second absence—that of the GDR’s athletic triumphs—displays a fundamental lack of understanding of how sport worked, and would ultimately cost the Federal Republic this prominent episode in the Hallstein war.
Sport functioned differently from international politics. Worldwide—not just in Western democracies—it viewed itself as nonpolitical and universalistic. By 1966, the Federal Republic might have gained membership to 1,121 NGOs compared to the GDR’s meager 252 (out of a total 1,470),86 but the latter had become a full member of every sports federation in the world (fifty-two) with the exception of FISU (student sport) and FIBT (bobsleigh).87 Between 1956 and 1965, it had taken part in eighty-five world championships in twenty-four Olympic disciplines and had been forced on only five occasions to compete in a joint German team.88 Sport, moreover, respected winners and indeed required their participation to make its championships valid. In the diplomatic sphere, the West Germans kept the East Germans on the margins (even at times of political vulnerability) because they were able to out-punch them economically. In the world of sport, however, the growing accomplishment of East German athletes in the course of the 1960s meant that their absence devalued the currency of international meets. Some federations even downgraded events from championship status if pressured to exclude the GDR.89 In sport, therefore, athletic capital replaced financial incentives and reversed the normal poles of Hallstein.
The Foreign Office’s failure or unwillingness to grasp this difference proved its undoing. In September 1966, Bonn wagered that its athletes needed only to assert their rights as stubbornly as the East Germans for event organizers to accede to their wishes. The government’s renewed resolve was soon put to the test in October 1966 at the Mexican “Pre-Olympic Weeks,” a meet organized annually in the mid-1960s to allow the 1968 Organizing Committee (OC) to test its stadia and give athletes a chance to gauge high-altitude conditions. At the same meet in 1965, the West German team had walked out at the sight of the East German flag and refused to return until it was removed. Since the Federal Republic enjoyed good relations with Mexico, the offending item had been taken down to allow the event to continue.90
In the late summer of 1966, however, the new West German ambassador, Dr. Carl August Zapp, was given a baptism of fire even before his ceremonial welcome in Mexico. For the 1966 event, the organizers—doubtless seeking a compromise—proposed to eliminate national flags from the opening and medal ceremonies but to fly them nonetheless around the eight stadiums and play the national anthem for East German gold medalists (as in Budapest).91 The Foreign Office was incensed and, under instruction from the cabinet (14 September 1966), sent its ambassador to inform the Mexican foreign minister that its team (under threat of losing DM 300,000 of governmental funds) had reserved an early flight home for all eventualities. To strengthen his hand, Zapp requested assistance, which duly arrived in the form of Werner Klingeberg, an experienced member of the diplomatic corps. Having served in the ranks of National Socialist sport and accompanied Leni Riefenstahl on her controversial film tour to the United States in 1938, Klingeberg was well connected and jetted in from Washington with assurances of support from the U.S. State Department, his old friend Avery Brundage, and Douglas Roby of the U.S. NOC. Despite hefty protests from the GDR, the event went ahead under a blanket ban on all national paraphernalia, a result celebrated as a triumph at the Foreign Office, with its enforcer bullishly exclaiming: “Mr. Daume told [the Mexicans] that he found himself in a situation he ‘couldn’t get on top of.’ If he couldn’t, then the Foreign Office seemed to be able to get on top of it.”92
Zapp, however, struck a more sober note, observing that such interventions left an unpleasant aftertaste and predicting the West Germans would not always be able to turn events to their advantage.93 The diplomatic machinations and their consequences in Mexico bear witness to the prescience of his statement. Most noticeably, a general slipperiness and confusion pervaded the conduct of leading functionaries in their dealings with the federal government. The Mexicans, who were obviously divided, passed Zapp and Klingeberg from one person to the next. Brundage was full of contradictions, obstinately refusing to classify the meet an Olympic event (which would have activated the desired Madrid formula), suggesting that only the Mexican and Olympic flags should be flown, and pedantically agreeing that the GDR should compete under the title “Ostdeutschland,” except in the three sports (boxing, swimming, and cycling) whose international associations had already approved the title “DDR.” Daume, who had originally tried to bring about a fait accompli by not informing the Ministry of the Interior about the Mexicans’ unwillingness to change the protocol, sent his own envoy to clarify the issue of designation (Klingeberg having omitted to do so!), whereupon the GDR withdrew in mid-competition. Despite Klingeberg’s triumphalist tones, the West Germans had done themselves no favors.94 Their actions had deprived athletes from around the world of the honor of wearing their national colors, invoked the ire of the IOC, and projected an image of the Federal Republic as international spoilsport.
The fracas in Mexico has been recounted here at some length, because in these years it was repeated in one form or another at innumerable events around the globe. Zapp was instructed to assuage the hosts on this occasion, reassuring them they had not been singled out for special treatment.95 But organizers and governments were beginning to take offense, and, increasingly, Bonn’s actions were playing into the GDR’s hands. As the East Germans deduced from the Mexico incident, the Federal Republic’s renewed offensive could be simply countered with a plea to organizers to act “in the spirit of peace and mutual understanding, according to the statutes and regulations of the international sports federations.” With Brundage and the international sports world now almost unanimously voicing their opposition to any form of discrimination, the GDR needed only to play the innocent and claim that “sport [should] never be allowed to become an extension of the Cold War or medium for the aggressive politics of the West German government.”96
In sport, therefore, in distinction to the world of trade or diplomacy, the GDR went with the grain of international opinion and mores, the Federal Republic against it. In West Germany, sports functionaries continued their efforts to reverse the government’s stance and bring their country into line with accepted practice. Daume even employed the same legal expert he had used to “oppose” the GDR’s advancement in Madrid in an attempt to persuade Bonn that competing in the presence of GDR insignia did not imply recognition.97 The Ministry of the Interior could not fault the juridical argument,98 but as the world increasingly accepted the GDR’s athletic rights, the government remained unmoved.99
Daume had hoped the change to the Grand Coalition in December 1966 might create a more relaxed atmosphere, but even Brandt’s arrival in the Foreign Office brought only slight relief.100 Some minor changes were wrought from Bonn in response to what was becoming an international landslide. For instance, just as the GDR had realized the need for flexibility in the pursuit of its goals,101 the West German government (privately) agreed in 1967 to allow its athletes, after due protest, to remain at events where GDR symbols were in evidence.102 On the whole, however, the Grand Coalition’s sports policy differed little from that of its predecessor. For although the new government embraced East-West détente, and the SPD leadership at the Foreign Office found some of the isolation campaign wearisome, Bonn still regarded Hallstein “as a form of leverage over the GDR, a ‘trump card’ that could be bargained away in exchange for concrete arrangements with the SED regime.”103 This tactic also shielded Kiesinger against criticism from ultraconservatives within his own party.104 Moreover, the Foreign Office was split internally, its two state secretaries representing opposite ends of the spectrum.105 Despite Brandt’s desire to open up sports relations with the East, uncertainty about the overall political climate encouraged caution and led to a virtual standstill. Furthermore, Bonn believed that the longer it held onto the Games the more difficult it would become for the IOC to find an alternative venue.106 The notion that this temporal card increased the Federal Republic’s chances of calling the shots was a grave miscalculation.
The IOC and the Eastern bloc were on the move: the former over written confirmation of the government’s commitment for 1972, which had not materialized since Vogel and Daume’s verbal assurance in Rome; the latter in its attempt to have the Madrid ruling changed to one that sealed complete independence for the GDR even before the 1968 Olympics took place.107 The two issues became inter-woven in the run-up to the Mexico Games. With Interior Minister Lücke refusing to furnish Daume with the requisite letter108 and Brandt declining Vogel’s admonitions to intervene,109 the 1967 IOC session in Tehran was set to be a tense affair. Only a long and rancorous debate over the recognition of North Korea, which left the plenum reluctant to enter any further discussion, prevented the Soviets from advancing the GDR’s case.110 But the mood in Tehran was clear, one member making “the macabre comparison to 1936, when Hitler, without hesitation, had tolerated Jews in the German team.”111 The 1968 Mexico Olympics, therefore, at which the next IOC session was scheduled, would form the backdrop for the Soviet bloc’s next assault. Under mounting pressure from Lausanne, the Munich OC (with governmental representatives abstaining) supplied its own promise of fair conduct, but not surprisingly the IOC continued to insist on a federal guarantee.112 In the autumn of 1968, the Ministry of the Interior proposed Daume be given a secret undertaking, which he could use in an emergency to forestall or derail any recognition debate.113 But given residual tensions between government departments and assurances from Brundage that the German question would not appear on the IOC agenda, neither Daume nor the ministries supporting him pursued the matter further.114
Expecting no major trouble in Mexico, Daume arrived to find business as usual.115 Resolutely ignoring world events, the IOC was allowing the Games to proceed as normal despite the student massacre and a plea from multiple gold-medalist Emil Zatopek for the Soviets to be banned in the wake of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The GDR and the Federal Republic were indulging in familiar rituals too. The East Germans lodged a complaint about the hoisting of the West German flag in the Olympic village to the strains of the national anthem rather than the neutral Beethoven,116 and—acting on a tip-off from a defector from the GDR cultural program117—the West Germans stopped their rivals parading into the Olympic stadium behind the forbidden nomenclature “DDR.”118 The Mexican police swooped at the stadium entrance and, despite East German Sports Association (DTSB) chairman Manfred Ewald instructing his athletes and officials to surround their sign, managed to cover it clumsily with the label “Alemania Este.”
But within hours of this incident, the IOC had granted the GDR full recognition. Although it had agreed to postpone the issue until its 1969 meeting in Warsaw, Brundage became a victim of his own scheming. Facing reelection in Mexico, the president had sought to retain the support of both Germanys in the course of 1968. He had assured the West Germans that the recognition issue would not be discussed in Mexico119 while simultaneously instructing their rivals that a technicality of the Madrid agreement—which became null and void after the 1968 Games—meant they only needed confirmation from the executive board rather than a full discussion in the plenum.120 Whether Brundage would have made good on his promise is a moot point. In any case, the East Germans became nervous and threatened to withdraw support for his reelection and expose his connivance to the membership.121 Brundage reopened the issue the next day with a gusting speech against discrimination in sport.122 Against the run of play in NGO politics—in May 1968 the GDR was turned down for membership to the World Health Organization by a vote of fifty-nine to nineteen123—the GDR gained full recognition by a margin of forty-four to four. West German IOC member Prinz Hannover’s motion to rid the Games entirely of national insignia narrowly failed to reach the required two-thirds majority, so the GDR could look forward to trooping its colors in Munich. Brundage, with Soviet backing, was reelected president.
In Mexico a Foreign Office observer, charged with monitoring the loyalty of the West German sports representatives,124 registered their lack of effort to influence African and Latin American IOC members.125 In the immediate aftermath Vogel was unperturbed, Daume and his colleagues relieved. Reaction in Bonn, by contrast, bordered on the hysterical: amid calls to give the event back, the CDU/CSU parliamentary caucus discussed declaring Munich an extraterritorial city for the duration of the Olympics.126 The cabinet, however, kept its cool. With Montreal eagerly waiting in the wings to snatch the 1972 event,127 Minister of the Interior Benda believed it impossible to return the Games,128 and the chancellor “establish[ed] that the preliminary consultation [had] shown that the IOC decision had no consequence in international law and should therefore be taken calmly.”129 Since the GDR’s flag would appear in fulfillment of another body’s statutes, since the IOC did not recognize states but rather geographical areas represented by NOCs, and since by declaring so in advance the Federal Republic would not even be granting a de facto recognition (stillschweigende Anerkennung), the GDR’s insignia, so the logic ran, could be tolerated in Munich. Forced to accept the new situation for fear of public outrage,130 the federal government eventually put its differences aside and simply reversed its earlier arguments.131 Not for the first time in the history of the 1972 Games, the paradox of sport’s “nonpolitical” nature came into play, the cabinet’s statements in subsequent months essentially mirroring those formerly made by the GDR and Daume’s legal expert in 1967.
In victory, the GDR switched tack as well, adopting the Federal Republic’s familiar line from previous years. Amid jubilation in the East German press, Ulbricht proclaimed “the decision once again underline[d] the fact that the presumptuous claim to sole recognition [Alleinvertretungsanmaßung] [had] been rejected.”132 Four days later a plan had already taken shape to exploit the opportunity to the full: IOC members who had voted for the GDR were to be sought out and the Mexico decision used to formulate steps toward diplomatic relations in carefully selected countries.133 In this area, there was indeed a rapid breakthrough in 1969, with a record six noncommunist nations recognizing the GDR in one year. But only one of them (Sudan) had an IOC member at the time of the Mexico vote. In other words, diplomatic success in the realm of sport had no direct effect on the world of politics. In this sense, Joachim Scholtyseck was correct to note how “insignificant cultural relations ultimately were when seen against the backdrop of major political disputes.”134 This does not alter the fact, however, that at the time both German governments treated sport with the utmost seriousness, fearing its defeats and cherishing its triumphs. Scholtyseck’s maxim would have been anathema to most German politicians of the 1960s. Furthermore, sport in that period—albeit in a relation of complex contingency—ran ahead of politics. Hallstein might have been the Realpolitik of its age, but sport proved a truer barometer of the future.
From late 1968 onward, the mercury began to fall. Pressed again by Brundage and Daume, the cabinet finally agreed to supply the IOC with a letter before the end of the year.135 It still balked at lifting the 1959 restrictions on the GDR flag, despite strong encouragement to do so by the interior ministers of the Länder136 and vocal agitation from many MPs.137 Notwithstanding some minor governmental triumphs at sports events, the interior ministers had pressed their case further by June 1969, and NATO relaxed its regulations. Thus, long after they had in any case become ineffectual, the final impediments to the smooth running of international meets were removed. The government could do little but echo NATO’s guidelines and permit the organizers of events in West Germany to fly their rival’s flag if required to do so by their federation.138 When Brandt came to power that year, there was little more to do. In the short term, the new chancellor and his secretary of state, Egon Bahr, “found it expedient” to continue Hallstein generally.139 But in March 1970, they acceded to the Länder’s wishes by lifting the 1959 restrictions and instructing their embassies—albeit without public announcement—to take no further steps against insignia at sports events, trade fairs, and exhibitions.140
Three years before the Munich Olympics, therefore, a particular phase of Cold War feuding drew to a close. But a new one simply took its place. The GDR might have won the flag wars, but Munich provided a unique opportunity for both Germanys to transmit particular messages to the world. While the West Germans had to attend to the Herculean task of hosting the most modern Games in Olympic history, their Eastern counterparts could focus on a local ideological derby. In contrast to the period up to 1969, sport and politics in the Federal Republic largely pulled together.141 Sport saw itself as contributing to Ostpolitik, while the government fostered greater athletic contact with the Eastern bloc.142 However, since the sports-political apparatus across the border was raising its game, there would be much for both to absorb and deflect.
The GDR was to pursue two goals at Munich: the establishment and increase of its own status, and the prevention of the Federal Republic’s attempts to do the same. It was to enjoy the party to the full while simultaneously destroying it for the hosts. The first aim had been broadly met by the IOC’s decision in Mexico. It was to be completed by the vigorous production of medal-winning athletes (a subject about which much has been written already).143 Having humiliated the Federal Republic on the track in Mexico, coming in fifth to its eighth, East Germany continued its meteoric rise in world sport via a system of talent-spotting and drug-fuelled training programs. It placed third at Munich and second four years later in Montreal, ahead of the United States. As widely signaled in the Eastern press, in 1972 the GDR intended to “let the West pay for the Games while getting on with winning them themselves.”144
The second aim—to spoil the Federal Republic’s positive self-image—was to be delivered via an equally prodigious propaganda campaign. Well-worn themes in the East’s critique of West German sport and society in general were to be repackaged for a broad international audience, the Federal Republic being portrayed as a hotbed of revanchism and neo-Nazism and the world being told of one Germany’s devotion to and the other’s dereliction of Olympic duty.145 The central committee of the SED passed its first Munich-related “decree” barely two months after the Mexico Games in January 1969 and segued swiftly into an orchestrated campaign of newspaper articles across the Eastern bloc.146 In the same year, the Gesellschaft zur Förderung des olympischen Gedankens in der DDR (Society for the Promotion of the Olympic Ideal in the GDR) published München 1972 Schicksalsspiele? (Munich 1972 Games of Destiny?), a work that manipulated Daume’s concern about the critical juncture 1972 represented in Olympic history.147 While none of the arguments were new, their compression into a loudly trumpeted, hard-hitting book, capped with the infamous and oft-repeated equation “2 × 36 = 72,” heralded three years of heavy bombardment.
At the same time, the GDR could normally rely on support from its socialist allies, who mercilessly countered perceived acts of discrimination against one of its group and denounced the inevitable faux pas committed by the OC in its implementation of complex Olympic law. The incorrect wording on the first Olympic coin, the appearance of Walter Umminger’s Olympisches Lesebuch, and the presence of emigrant organizations and U.S. propaganda radio stations (Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty) in Munich and Bavaria allowed them to embarrass the Federal Republic with robust responses on the world stage. Specifically targeted by the GDR as “counterrevolutionary organizations” and “international spy- and agent-rings,” campaigns against the latter two enjoyed unwavering and enthusiastic support from the Soviet Union and its satellites closest to the West German border (especially Czechoslovakia).148 Amid rumors about the gathering of right-wing groups in Munich, the Federal Republic was forced to broker “an Olympic truce” that entailed moving the expellee organizations’ annual congress away from Munich. The considerable domestic complications of this deal were matched by the friction generated in reaching a compromise between Munich/Bonn and the high-profile presidents of the American stations (General Lucius D. Clay and former U.S. president Harry Truman).
Agitation against Munich was an iterative process. When one topic burnt out, the Soviet allies let it smolder149 while lighting the next fire.150 On the surface, therefore, events might have appeared to be unfolding according to predictable patterns, one side drawing from a familiar inventory of irritations, the other parrying with weary but wary exasperation. This was certainly a vital aspect of the Eastern bloc’s approach to the Munich Games but it was not the most important. During this period, the new political situation made the GDR’s position less stable. Ostpolitik was opening up fresh channels of communication between the Federal Republic and individual socialist states and providing the medium through which incentives could be offered and deals brokered to the potential detriment of its rival. Amongst the four wartime allies, the Soviets had perhaps most to gain from Brandt’s policies. The USSR had seen its international reputation plummet after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and felt increasingly under threat from China. Domestically too, it needed trade and technological input from the West to support an economy that was struggling to feed its own citizens. Although standing to achieve international recognition, the GDR was concerned. Even before the SPD came to power, East Berlin sensed in Bahr’s “Wandel durch Annäherung” (change through rapprochement) the danger of Western infiltration and isolation from its allies.151 Brandt’s election victory had little effect on the GDR’s uncompromising sports-political line, and seemed, in fact, to reinforce it. Fearing the Federal Republic would use the Games to push its claim for “Alleinvertretung” and increase its influence in international sports federations, the East German leadership became more vigilant—indeed paranoid—than ever.
Recent historiography has shown that the East Berlin was right to watch its back in the new political climate. Generally, the Soviets were not prepared to buy its recognition at any cost, and in keeping with Brezhnev’s desire to maintain the subsidiarity of his satellites, would neither relinquish their strategic rights on GDR soil nor sacrifice their victor’s say over Germany as a whole. The complicated mechanism of Ostpolitik—which bundled four individual treaties with Moscow, Warsaw, East Berlin, and Prague and an agreement between the four wartime allies over the status of West Berlin—only served to consolidate Moscow’s control. Cascading so that it ensured no agreement could be signed until the Soviets had first secured the deal that suited them best, three years of negotiations allowed the USSR to consolidate its postwar suzerainty in Eastern Europe. The considerable time-lag between the promulgation and ratification of treaties in the West German parliament allowed, and forced, the Soviets to exert considerable influence on discussions over the other treaties. This complex mesh of diplomatic activity affected the GDR in particular. In contrast to the relative freedoms afforded the Federal Republic by the West, East Berlin was micromanaged by the USSR, which demanded by turns a cooling or intensification of inter-German talks. Moscow showed little compunction in disappointing its ally’s expectations either, decoupling its satellite’s interests at various junctures. Moreover, it skillfully exploited a rift between Ulbricht and his deputy Erich Honecker, keeping both in play until it was convenient to let the latter usurp the former.152
If political relations were typified by suspicion, frustration, and the desire to exert and evade control, the course of sporting diplomacy hardly ran more smoothly. In sport, in contrast to politics, however, it was the imperial master that felt exploited by its satellite. Three months before Brandt’s election victory, Sergei Pawlow, the chairman of the committee for physical exercise and sport at the council of ministers of the USSR, sent a letter to the Soviet ambassador in Bonn, presenting a catalogue of grievances, which corresponded to the GDR’s general attempts to emancipate itself from the USSR in the late Ulbricht era. From the perspective of the Moscow sports establishment, the GDR had failed to play ball since its full recognition by the IOC in 1968. It bragged about its diplomatic breakthrough without acknowledging the decisive contribution of the entire Eastern bloc. “Seeking only its own advantage,” it had taken to tactically removing its top athletes from all but medal-rich events and, worse, to tricking its way to victory over the USSR (for instance by sending its national squad unannounced to play the Soviet youth team). While the Soviets had generously shared the results of their sports science research, the GDR had teasingly gone to ground with its newly acquired knowledge.153 And while the Soviets had sponsored the election of GDR colleagues onto the committees and executive boards of international federations, the East Germans had reneged on mutual commitments. At the Mexico session of the IOC, the Soviets had forced Heinz Schöbel to confront Brundage and prevent the recognition issue slipping off the agenda for another year. Thus in the late 1960s, although the sports rivalry between the USSR and the GDR had not yet reached the heights of acrimony of the late 1970s and 1980s, distrust and discontent had already taken root.154
In contrast to Ostpolitik, sport represented a sphere in which the GDR could express semiautonomy from the Soviet Union. Both realms would turn in on each other, however, as the socialist states began to consider their approach to Munich against the unfolding political process. This preparation for the Olympics interacted with the broader developments but—not surprisingly given the looser coordinates in sport—reflected them and deviated from them in equal measure. The most significant difference lay in the scope given to East Berlin by Moscow to assume a defining role in the Eastern bloc’s plans for 1972. While the Soviets directed events on and behind the political stage, they were content to let the East Germans take up the running for the Olympics. In fact, the lengths to which the GDR went to influence its allies and disseminate its Olympic policies represented the largest public and diplomatic operation in the country’s history, exceeding even the political fallout from the Prague Spring of 1968.
Shortly after Ulbricht replied abrasively to Brandt’s declaration of government in December 1969, the Sekretariat des ZK confirmed the formation of “AG 72,” a Party Commission for the Political and Ideological Preparation of the Olympic Games.155 This commission, which remained unknown to Western sources, assumed responsibility for coordinating and implementing Munich propaganda.156 The stellar constitution of the twenty-three-man committee underlines the importance of the Games to the GDR. Reporting to the Politburo, it was chaired by the assistant head of the Westabteilung, Albert Norden, and included Michael Kohl, who became the GDR’s chief Ostpolitik negotiator.157 Alongside members of the DTSB, the State Committee for Physical Exercise and Sport, the Free German Youth (FDJ), and the Free Federation of German Trade Unions (FDGB), it contained several assistant ministers and the heads and/or assistant heads of all central committee departments necessary for the swift implementation of any of its directives.158 As one insider noted, it was “the only GDR institution . . . in which four qualified political functionaries [were] chiefly concerned with the question of the 1972 Olympics.”159 Its tasks fell into three main areas: liaison with the socialist brother states; the regulation of the GDR’s interaction with the Games (tourists, youth and student camps, cultural programs); and the production of a unified message to counteract the Federal Republic’s attempts to use sport to “unleash a broad wave of nationalism and gain ideological influence over the population.”160
Its furthest-reaching measures resulted from decisions to arrange a meeting of the foreign ministers, government sports representatives, and leaders of sports bodies from every socialist country (with the exception of China and Albania); to enter bilateral agreements with each of these; and to take soundings from and provide and exchange information with friendly and selected neutral countries. The net was to be cast wider afield to liaise with familiar socialist partner states such as North Korea, Cuba, and Yugoslavia; to exploit already existing political, trade, and cultural contacts in Algeria, India, Ceylon, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador; to sound out Iraq, Cambodia, Sudan, Syria, the United Arab Republic (of Egypt and Syria), Burma, India, Guinea, Mali, and Tasmania; and to seek out left-wing sympathizers in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, France, Italy, and Austria.161 The unfolding of the political negotiations in 1970 only served to confirm the basic tenets of the GDR’s Olympic plans. After the first meeting with the Federal Republic in Erfurt in March 1970, an SED commission charged with assessing the possible outcomes of German-German talks concluded that recognition was unlikely before 1975 and that “strengthening the alliance with the Soviet Union and other socialist states and furthering the international recognition of the GDR” should take top priority.162
Accordingly, the East Germans’ massively ambitious sports-political concept for the Games was executed to the letter. From the early 1950s until 1969, East German sports functionaries had met with their allies at annual meetings of the sport leadership of socialist countries (Sportleitungen der sozialistischen Länder). From 1969 onward, however, they took up the running themselves. At a special meeting of deputy foreign ministers and sports leaders held in East Berlin in May 1969, the hosts were able to sign up their allies to a detailed political road-map for Munich.163 After particularly vocal support from the Poles and the Soviets, the deputy ministers—including the normally reticent Romanian representative—agreed in general to uncover and counter the “underhand politics” of West German imperialism and to form a united and decisive front against discrimination.164 Practically, they were to argue for the maintenance of the ceremonial aspects of Olympism; to stress its internationalist character; to uphold the notion of West Berlin as a separate political and cultural entity; to coordinate a response to invitations to the Olympic cultural festival; and to keep sports and sports-scientific contact with the West to a minimum. The meeting agreed to manage these initiatives via vibrant mutual exchange and further bi- and multilateral consultations.
Buoyed by this early success, the GDR nonetheless realized it would need to work hard to maintain the initial momentum. By June the following year, it had met at the central committee and ambassadorial level with the Soviet Union, with the foreign ministries of the other Warsaw Pact allies, and had established contact with a string of other countries from Cuba to Mongolia.165 Olympic contact persons had been identified in GDR embassies across the Eastern bloc and in reciprocal embassies in East Berlin.166 On the surface, the GDR found its allies politely obliging. With the exception of Romania, they all agreed to the future establishment of multilateral agreements on key individual matters. But in reality, they were already going their own way. The East Germans had originally argued for complete rejection of the relay and—after disapproving comments made to the Munich organizers by the IOC at its session in Amsterdam in May 1970—of the youth camp and cultural festival as well.167 Nonetheless, the Soviets, Hungarians, and Romanians had established informal links with Western youth organizations; Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania looked likely to join the torch relay;168 and the latter two with Poland were opting into the cultural program.169 This was being organized mainly via the usual commercial channels that regulated such forms of East-West exchange during the Cold War, and clearly the prospect of Western currency and Olympic capital provided more luster than the GDR’s ideological smear could tarnish.170 According to Western media sources, the Soviets and Czechs, who were keeping the GDR in the dark about their intentions, had also entered negotiations.171
On a more general level, however, the GDR was concerned that its allies were underestimating the inherent dangers of rapprochement. Some—correctly as it turned out—denied there would be problems with the GDR flag and anthem in Munich. Others argued that Brandt’s government had adopted a more realistic approach to the socialist states and therefore would hardly seek confrontation in Munich. Even the normally obliging North Koreans withdrew at short notice from organizing the annual conference of sports leaders.172 All in all, the GDR’s assessment of its partners’ political preparations for the Olympics was withering.173 Concerned at the turn of events, the SED central committee asked Moscow to call an emergency meeting of European brother states at party level in December 1970.174 In the Russian capital, the GDR found itself forced into softening its initial vetoes in order to stay in touch with its allies. With prior Soviet consent, it gave way on culture and youth issues, but was able to reinforce its ideological agenda at length and reach a new consensus on central issues.175 Only the Romanians dissented.
In this first phase, the GDR, albeit with limited success, acted as the policeman of the East. At a time when its shackling by the USSR prevented it from free negotiations with the Federal Republic on the grand political stage, it was allowed to patrol the socialist sports world with strong intent. Doubtless its relative freedom to wander resulted from the conservative sports-political line it was propagating, one which matched the one imposed by Brezhnev on the GDR in its relations with the Federal Republic and wholeheartedly supported by Honecker. In the GDR, sport traditionally fell under the remit of the deputy leader of the SED, and certainly Ulbricht was out of the loop.176 He was not informed of the Moscow meeting and, as his hold on the reigns loosened further, the GDR’s Olympic politics were to ferment implacably around “Abgrenzung” (demarcation) and the rejection of any West German “Alleinvertretungsanmaßung” (presumptuous claim to sole representation). As Ostpolitik developed and Honecker came fully to power, the East Germans’ line on the Olympics hardened. Their implacability set them apart from their Warsaw-pact allies. While the Soviets were bent on extracting the maximum gain from both Germanys, the satellites wearied of the German question in sport as much as the Federal Republic’s allies had from the mid-1960s onward. In the course of 1970, polemics in the Eastern-bloc press against Munich subsided and in some cases even displayed some “benevolence”: West German analysts noted that (with the exception of the GDR) Olympic coverage in the Eastern bloc had become “detectably more objective” after Brandt’s meeting with Stoph in Kassel.177 At the Moscow meeting, moreover, the GDR overplayed its hand on the Nazi legacy and underestimated the positive effects that Ostpolitik was having on its allies. As one representative lamented on his return to East Berlin: “The Olympics can’t just be compared to the Games of 1936. For all its flaws and weaknesses, the Federal Republic is not a fascist state. . . . We must therefore desist from the political strategy of throwing insults and making out that it is only a matter of unmasking our opponent.”178 Both stances—the Soviets’ general slipperiness and the unwanted positive reception of Ostpolitik among the satellites—were to complicate the GDR’s diplomatic preparations immeasurably.
It suited the Soviets to be called upon by the GDR as the highest authority in cases such as the perceived crisis of December 1970. Such instances allowed Moscow to reassert its own position of hegemony and reassure East Berlin of its loyalty. They also gave it the space to pursue its own goals. For its part, the GDR was not blindly naïve and kept a firm, suspicious eye on its ally, especially as the latter produced a series of contradictory statements in the course of 1970.179 It watched on with regret as Daume, Mayor of Kiel Günther Bantzer, and Klein were given a harder time from sympathetic socialists in Helsinki than the Soviet press in Leningrad.180 And it felt left out in the cold when its proposal for a bilateral high-altitude training center in one of the Soviet republics met with barely lukewarm enthusiasm.181 Most significantly, the GDR was humiliated as the Soviets failed to enforce the decision not to participate in the Olympic Torch Relay. Despite the agreement to boycott this symbolically resonant prequel to the Games, Hungary and Bulgaria were allowed to break ranks, with the Soviets turning a deaf ear to pleas for them to intervene.182 The GDR’s plans for the Eastern bloc to abstain completely from cultural aspects of the Munich event lay in ruins.
In 1970, quite apart from the master narrative of Ostpolitik, Moscow’s bid to host the 1976 Olympics provided the Soviets with another reason for veering as much to the West as to the East on the German issue. Explaining the importance of a “flexible strategy” to win the event, the Soviets had counseled the East Germans that their public support for them would temporarily wane.183 Indeed, Soviet press coverage of Munich’s preparations remained “reserved” in the period, and Andrianow conspicuously abstained from abusive comments in a high-profile interview with Die Zeit.184 Despite such favorable conditions, the competition to host the 1976 Games proved diplomatically complex for the Federal Republic, as the United States also proposed Los Angeles as a candidate city. Keen to host the Games in their bicentennial year in a city that enjoyed the warm support of California-born President Nixon,185 the United States informed the Foreign Office in Bonn that it would appreciate the votes of the West German representatives.186 Daume, however, had already given assurances to Brandt that the three West Germans on the committee would follow the chancellor’s desire to support Moscow,187 a message that had been passed back through official Soviet channels by the Federal Republic’s ambassador in Moscow.188 Whether deliberately concealing Brandt’s approval or genuinely preferring to view matters in Olympic rather than world-political discourse, Daume argued that the Federal Republic would support the USSR not only because the Games had never been held in a socialist country but also—with some cynicism—because the poor standard of living in the Soviet capital would give Munich, four years on, retrospective sheen.189 In the end, either neutralized by the worldwide campaigning of the superpowers or shying away from an awkward decision, the IOC opted for the compromise candidate, Montreal, a city few had given any chance before the vote. The Soviets lost in such bad grace that many were relieved they had been defeated.190
By 1971, however, the Soviets had the broader political jigsaw on which to concentrate again. For the GDR, it was a time of increased concern as their Soviet allies drew closer to fuller agreement with the West. Despite Soviet assurances to the GDR that sports contact with the Federal Republic would remain at its current low level, the political rapprochement brought with it an increase in official dialogue between sports leaders.191 In the space of just over one year, two West German parliamentarians made a sports-related trip to the USSR;192 Willi Daume and Hans-Jochen-Vogel, followed by representatives of the DSB, visited Moscow; a delegation from the Munich OC attended the Spartakiad; and Sergei Pawlov became the first Soviet sports functionary at minister level to travel to the Federal Republic. This upturn in activity was significant, since cultural exchange, first institutionalized in the German-Soviet cultural treaty of 1959, had previously been nothing more than dutifully measured.193 However, at the same time as the ink was drying on the Moscow treaty, the Soviets began canceling cultural events—including the Munich OC’s Olympic exhibition scheduled for Moscow—to hasten its ratification.194 As the negotiation of a Berlin agreement came onto the agenda too, the symbolic capital of the West Berlin sports issue rose dramatically in stock. Soviet press criticism of Munich increased significantly,195 and in the weeks before the signing of the Four Powers Agreement in September 1971, the USSR created havoc for the SPD by refusing until the eleventh hour to issue visas for West Berlin athletes competing at a Soviet-West German track-and-field meet in Kiev.196 Such brinkmanship and the denial of rights that were about to be conceded,197 Bonn concluded, were aimed at inflating issues so that the Soviets could appear to be giving away more at the negotiating table.198
The Berlin-Kiev incident, however, proved to be the final West German-Soviet sports political crisis. As attention turned to the final inter-German stages of the negotiations and to saving Brandt’s government in 1972, the sting was drawn from direct German-Soviet confrontation. In March 1972, the cancelled Munich exhibition eventually went ahead in Moscow, the Soviets using this position of generosity to insert an art exhibition extolling the virtues of Soviet sport into the official cultural program of Munich.199 Despite the unavoidable political nuancing of such events, cultural exchange was essentially reharnessed to the goal of political progress.
In 1972, therefore, the Soviets settled back into the natural rhythms of playing the East and West Germans alike for all they could get. On the West German side, this meant a rush of sporting visitors to Munich and its political environs. In March, the mayor of Moscow, Promyslow, traveled to Bonn, Düsseldorf, and Munich and paid a special visit to the technical suppliers Siemens.200 The constitution of the next delegation to come calling underlined the Soviets’ vital interest in Western trade. Just two days before the Bundestag vote of no-confidence in Brandt’s government, the OC in Munich was visited by a fourteen-strong group from the USSR under leading politician Nowikow. The group included the deputy chair of Gosplan (Lebetew), the deputy minister for the Radio Industry (Pankratow), the minister and leader of the Department of Foreign Trade (Simakow and Nikitin respectively) and representatives of the State Committee for Science and Technology.
In May, Pawlow accompanied the USSR soccer team to their match against the Federal Republic to mark the official opening of the Olympic Stadium, and lauded the ratification of the Moscow and Warsaw treaties, underscoring the importance of sport in the popular political imagination.201 As well as sending a full squad that would “present the world with an array of superlative sporting achievements,” he confirmed the USSR’s full participation in the cultural and scientific program. One hundred and twenty young people (50 percent more than originally agreed with the GDR) would attend the Youth Camp, representing “the entire multi-national family of the peoples of the Soviet Union.” The West Germans spared no expense in sealing the mood of cooperation.202 The Soviets were given coffee with Genscher and taken to the opera at the National Theater and Daume’s private birthday party in Ruhpolding. They planted a tree on the Olympic site and were flown by helicopter to the Adidas factory in Herzogenaurach on the way to lunch at the top of the Zugspitze.
These exchanges fitted snugly with the general political mood of the summer of 1972. On 3 June, the Moscow treaty was implemented. Ten days later, business followed a reassuringly unspectacular course, trade-offs being offered, exchanged, and delayed. When a delegation of Soviet parliamentarians visited Bonn, they were scarcely perturbed by the CDU/CSU caucus’s attempts to lure them into jaundiced interpretations of the treaty, and enjoyed the generally improved and relaxed atmosphere.203 The West Germans requested equal access to publicity in the USSR, while the Soviets, buoyed by Nixon’s recent visit to the USSR, were keen to forge ahead with a conference on European security.204 The Federal Republic, now in a position to concentrate on its negotiations with the GDR, was able to stall without impunity, claiming that the American energies necessary for such a task would be channeled into their own election until November. The time was almost ripe for “putting flesh on the bones of the treaty,” but in Brandt’s own words, patience was the order of the day.205 The Olympics allowed the West Germans to sweeten such patience with hospitality and good intentions, and the Soviets to accept it with apparent grace.
The East Germans, deep into negotiations of their own treaty at last, had good reason to be concerned about their ally’s Olympic dalliance with the West. It was obvious that the Soviets’ contact with the Federal Republic had gone far beyond the low level they had originally promised the GDR.206 It was equally clear that they were negligent in informing their ally about their contact with the West. At the 1971 Spartakiad, for instance, the East German delegation had been startled to read press reports of the West German Olympic exhibition to take place the same year.207 And when the GDR delegation went to Munich to discuss the logistics of their team’s accommodation, they were disconcerted to find the OC buoyed by the personal backing of the Soviets. By the end of 1971, the GDR was well aware that energy was draining from the Eastern bloc’s coordinated attack. The IOC session in September 1971 satisfied the Soviets and their satellites that there would be no downscaling of the prestige-conferring Olympic victory ceremonies at Munich and undercut the credibility of the GDR’s propaganda.208 Information gathered from its allies in subsequent months suggested a distinct mellowing of stance toward the Games. By this stage, most socialist countries judged the preparations for the 1972 Olympics as perfectly normal and in keeping with the scale of the event, forcing the GDR—ironically at a point when for different reasons the topic remained contentious in the Federal Republic and the IOC—to relativize its own stance on the Munich Games’ ”gigantism.”
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At Munich the sports clash between the two German rivals retained the quality of a highly condensed and rarefied version of Cold War enmity. But between the Olympic years of 1968 and 1972, many changes had occurred to the political and sports-political contexts in which this contest was embedded. At Mexico 1968, the GDR defeated the Federal Republic both on and off the track. By the time it marched into the Olympic Stadium four years later, however, the best it could manage was a draw. Once again it defeated the Federal Republic in the medal table, but both countries nestled side by side in places three and four, the West German athletes turning in the only significantly improved performance of any Western nation since 1968. Diplomatically too, large cracks had developed in the socialist states’ united front of 1968. Determined to meet Brandt’s rapprochement with demarcation, the GDR instructed its team to isolate itself from all contact with the West. Famously, its athletes blanked President Heinemann on his visit to the Olympic village. At the same time, however, its allies were embracing the advantages of Ostpolitik and the Olympics more warmly. As the torch relay meandered across socialist southeast Europe, it was greeted with unalloyed pleasure by hundreds of thousands of athletes and ordinary citizens in Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia. In Hungary, hot-air balloons embossed with the five Olympic rings rose into the air as flowers were thrown over the runners from a helicopter amid repeated cries of “München! München!” and “Auf Wiedersehen!”209 Those countries that had declined to participate now also featured strongly in other ways. The Czechs presented the OC with a highly valuable statue to enhance Munich’s Olympic landscape—a gift that the Ministry of the Interior interpreted as a “gesture of reconciliation with regard to the Munich Agreement of 1938.”210 Polish music rang out at the opening ceremony, and the Soviets, as chief guests of honor, were whisked to it by helicopter after a lavish lunch at the city hall.211
The Cold War, of course, was far from over, and modes of behavior more akin to its normal habitus also still pertained. Often—particularly where the Soviets were concerned—several apparently contradictory tactics were employed simultaneously. Within a ten-day period in April 1972, for instance, the Russians sent a delegation of significant rank to Munich and pushed themselves and the GDR to the limit to ensure Brandt’s survival in the Kafkaesque vote of no-confidence in the Bundestag.212 At the same time, however, they called a special meeting with the SED’s Rudi Hellmann to reaffirm plans for tough action against abuse and discrimination at the Games.213 Two points become clear here. First, when the Soviets had allowed the GDR to police the Eastern bloc in preparation for Munich, they had done so on their own terms. At the beginning of the Ostpolitik process, it doubtless suited them to let the East Germans run the Olympic project while they gauged the distance they needed to maintain while pursuing their political goals. Part of that distancing actually consisted in permitting the satellites a considerable amount of latitude in dealing with the GDR’s strict instructions. When the Soviets had achieved their goals and, to East Berlin’s chagrin, allowed the satellites to involve themselves substantively in the Games’ cultural programs, it suited them to close ranks again with the GDR.214 Two days after the implementation of the Moscow treaty on 3 June, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko was in East Berlin scaremongering that the Federal Republic was almost certainly aiming for a united Germany. A series of hard-line meetings of the socialist states’ sports representatives in the second quarter of 1972, at which the Russians took the leading role, falls conspicuously into the general pattern of the Soviets’ Ostpolitik tactics: engagement with the West invariably balanced by discouragement to the GDR to follow suit.215 Second, for the Soviets in comparison to the East Germans, sports diplomacy in the final years before the Munich Games occupied a lower level than the major political themes of the day. As their Sports Minister Pawlow told Daume in the summer of 1971, when the West Berlin crisis seemed to be brewing: “Die Hunde bellen, die Karawane zieht weiter” (the dogs bark but the caravan moves on). The Foreign Office’s interpretation of this Russian proverb perfectly sums up the relatively minor effect of the niggles that accompanied much East-West interaction in sports at the time: “the attacks will continue without really threatening future dealings.”216
Throughout the run-up to the Games, the West Germans met the GDR’s provocation with great restraint.217 The resolution of difficult situations was left mainly to sports functionaries such as Daume, whose excellent relations with counterparts in the Eastern bloc could often be exploited.218 Failing that, Daume was not adverse to splitting Eastern bloc loyalties on the committees and subcommittees of the IOC.219 The federal government, apart from dissuading its sports functionaries from involving themselves in overtly political discussion on trips behind the Iron Curtain, usually kept its distance.220 In fact, it was not until April 1972 that an interdepartmental “Arbeitsgruppe für innerdeutsche und außenpolitische Fragen” (Working Party for Internal and External Affairs) began to meet.221 The appearance of this official working party so late in the day confirms the West Germans’ underlying confidence in their Olympic project. Although wary all the while of the GDR’s propaganda, the organizers increasingly enjoyed the positive mood engendered by Ostpolitik. They could also count on the Eastern bloc’s long-standing investment in the Olympic ideal and reluctance to relinquish its benefits on behalf of the GDR. Off the track, the GDR certainly scored some victories. But they were small in scope and paled beside the Federal Republic’s production of an Olympic spectacle, which intellectually, culturally, and aesthetically surpassed all that had gone before it. Besides, events of an altogether different magnitude were about to steal the show.