SPORTS AND SOCIETY 503
statement made before the sports committee of the German Bundestag in
1977, the CDU representative Wolfgang Schäuble neither wanted to rule
out nor condemn the use of such drugs in principle.^8
Only isolated voices raised objections to this practice, such as Bri-
gitte Berendonk, who had seen this doping fi rsthand on both sides as a
former athlete in East and West Germany. She repeatedly made public
statements, warning against the danger of creating “monsters.”^9 Refer-
ences to international “equal opportunity” were often made as part of a
refl exive, rather hollow argument made to defend doping research and
the use of performance-enhancing drugs in one’s own backyard on both
sides.^10 Yet such seemingly similar patterns of legitimation cannot sweep
away the diff erences in the way in which doping was used in the GDR
and the FRG. The fact that the GDR was a dictatorship was very much a
decisive factor even in sports because the state basically had total control
over its athletes. Doping took place in West Germany with the informal
approval of countless offi cials in the diff erent sports associations, but it
was mainly done within the interconnected circles of athletes, doctors,
and coaches.^11 In East Germany, however, it was subject to centralized
planning: since at least 1974, doping was organized and carried out sys-
tematically according to what was referred to as a Staatsplanthema (state
planning schemes)—and it was sometimes achieved by the coercion and
repression of the athletes themselves.^12 Although the details about this
forced doping in the East had become known in West Germany through
the sport refugees who had fl ed the GDR, it did not make nearly as much
of a stir as other human rights violations taking place behind the Iron
Curtain.^13 The West German sporting world in fact welcomed the dop-
ing expertise that East German sports medicine professionals brought
with them when they defected to the West. Dr. Josef Nöcker, for exam-
ple, was the man behind the infamous “Kolbe shot.”^14 Likewise, Dr. Alois
Mader made a name for himself as an infl uential expert in performance
enhancement through the use of anabolic steroids after 1974, and Dr.
Hartmut Riedel enjoyed a similar kind of fame at the end of the 1980s.^15
Without a doubt, West German politicians and sport functionaries were
most fascinated by the organizational aspects of the GDR’s Sportwun-
der. Since the sports equivalent of the “Sputnik shock” in the summer of
1968, when the GDR beat out West Germany in the medal count for the
fi rst time, the question “do socialists run faster?”^16 symbolized the re-
lentless search for functional elements that could be copied. But much of
what contributed to the success of GDR athletes could not be replicated
in West Germany simply because of the diff erence in the two systems.
The completely disproportional amount of state funding that was pumped
into elite sports in the GDR—the full extent of which was kept a secret