SPORTS AND SOCIETY 507
“proper” amateurs from the West. The GDR proudly won four Olympic
medals in soccer, but no one really seemed to care.^33 Many soccer fans in
the GDR began to look longingly over at the West. As a result of the im-
mense popularity of the Bundesliga and the West German national team,
many East German soccer fans started to follow more than one team: in
addition to their GDR club, they often supported a West German club
such as Bayern München or Hamburger Sport-Verien (HSV), or even the
DFB national team. The SED and the Stasi, however, were not fans of this
phenomenon, and they kept a close eye on the situation while imposing
strict sanctions: if East German fans traveled to matches in the Eastern
Bloc involving West German teams, their signs and slogans were highly
censored. Even seemingly harmless slogans, such as “We welcome the
FC Bayern München” aroused the ire of the GDR security apparatus.
When the West German national team played a qualifying match for the
European championships in Warsaw in 1971, the Stasi was on high alert
as hundreds of fans traveled to the city from the GDR. Despite numerous
targeted eff orts to crack down on this, including widespread infi ltration
of the fan scene, the SED’s apparatus never got this phenomenon under
control.^34 It was particularly troubling to the GDR state that the insubor-
dinate fans were almost all part of the so-called Wall generation, which
meant—at least in the eyes of the SED—that they should not really have
had any ties with the other Germany.^35 Whereas West Germany faced a
mounting problem with violently aggressive right-wing radical fans in the
1970s and 1980s, the security forces in the GDR not only had a problem
with such hooligans,^36 but also with another group of supposedly “crimi-
nal” soccer fans: the German-German away fans.^37
The Cleft between Raison d’État and the Autonomy of SportsAccording to the respective statutes, West German sports were committed
to remaining “apolitical.” For the most part, this meant that they sought
to remain politically and religiously neutral as part of a conscious eff ort to
break with the legacy of the Nazi period, as well as with the confessional
and social divide that had occurred during the Weimar Republic. Yet in
the system rivalry of the Cold War, the sports organizations, whether it
be the German National Olympic Committee, the DSB (German Sport
Federation), or the DFB—the latter of which was the most infl uential pro-
fessional sports association—defi nitely took sides. For the most part, they
did so by expressing their general agreement with the stance that the West
German government took towards the GDR and the entire Eastern Bloc.
Due to the tensions between the two superpower blocs in the 1980s, a
number of fundamental confl icts emerged between the sports world and