506 JUTTA BRAUN
through a series of incremental steps, such as the Statute on Contract
Players. This marked the beginning of the success story of the German
Bundesliga, which has also become a site of collective memory for the
Germans.^27 The history of the diff erent soccer clubs, such as Schalke 04
or Bayern München, is deeply entwined with the economic and social de-
velopments in the respective regions. As such, these clubs have contrib-
uted to the crystallization of local and regional identity.^28 The identities
of the clubs themselves and their traditions date back to when they were
founded, mostly around the turn of the nineteenth century. Soccer in the
GDR took an entirely diff erent path. After 1948, the SED pushed through a
radical break with the bourgeois remnants of associational culture in East
Germany, and the traditional club teams were either turned into socialist
organizations with new names or entirely new clubs were founded.^29 For
example, the army soccer team of the ASK Vorwärts and the Dynamo
teams propped up by the “security forces” of the GDR (Stasi, police, and
customs) implanted structures imported from the Soviet Union into East
German soccer.
At the level of everyday life in the 1970s and 1980s, however, soccer
was not very diff erent in the GDR compared to West Germany. The re-
gional teams in both German states were the bearers of the sports equiva-
lent of hometown pride. Moreover, in contrast to the rest of the GDR sport
system, soccer was able to develop a covert kind of capitalism: because
of the immense popularity of the sport, club directors as well as regional
SED offi cials had a great interest in “buying” the best players, which led
to the establishment of a shadow system of illegal premiums and signing
bonuses.^30 Internationally, however, the selection of players available in
the GDR could never come close to achieving the level of performance
off ered by the West German international teams. The Deutscher Fußball-
bund (DFB) team had not only won three world championships and taken
part in six of the fi nal matches, but also had taken home two European
championship victories by 1990. The GDR, on the other hand, had only
taken part in a single fi nal round of these championships in 1974. A great
deal of speculation has surrounded the possible reasons for this diff er-
ence in performance.^31 Yet it is clear that the focus of the SED sports
leadership on medal-winning sports played a considerable role in this
respect. In response to a question posed in 1986 by a West German re-
porter as to why there were so few tall players to be found on the GDR
team, the soccer coach Lothar Kurbjuweit from Jena answered laconi-
cally, “The tall soccer players are rowers here!”^32 The East German team,
however, did have its share of the limelight at the Olympic Games. As was
so often the case in the GDR, the professional players from the GDR team
competed as “amateurs” at the Olympic Games, and came up against the