514 JUTTA BRAUN
Furthermore, it was diffi cult for the GDR to take advantage of certain
facets of the progressive commercialization of sports from which numer-
ous East European sports countries profi ted at the time, namely the tem-
porary or permanent “lending” or “letting go” of socialist athletes to the
West in exchange for hard cash in foreign currency; this had been done
by Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic since the mid-1980s. In con-
trast, for the GDR it had always been a great risk to let athletes take part
in competitions in the West because of the division of Germany, which
made it rather tempting for many athletes to defect to the West. Katarina
Witt, for example, was closely monitored by nine employees of the GDR
sports apparatus when she took the fi rst steps toward commercial fi gure
skating performances. Her guards “could have been called into action in
an emergency situation in order to make sure that nothing happened to
her.”^72 Despite the ideological considerations, however, it seemed that
Ewald was impressed by some aspects of the boom in new marketing
opportunities, for he noted, “What has been made possible by commer-
cialism today is unbelievable. The Poles just got 1.4 million dollars for
their soccer player Boniek. As our friends have told us, they estimate that
about 600 athletes and trainers from Poland are involved in sports abroad
in Western countries.”^73
At the same time, indignant GDR athletes began to ask more often
whether they could keep the fees and prizes that they won instead of
having to hand them over to the German Gymnastics and Sports Feder-
ation (Deutscher Turn- und Sportbund, or DTSB) as had been done in
the past.^74 Yet the “class hate” directed at West German sports that had
been cultivated by the GDR for decades now hindered a reform of sports
policy. The star socialist athletes had always been treated as the property
of the state. Since 1971—in the wake of several embarrassing defections
of top-notch athletes to the West—the sports squads were subject to the
meticulous scrutiny of the Stasi. Not only during training, but also in
their private lives, agents kept tabs on them in order to prevent undesired
contact with the West or attempts to defect. The legal transfer of GDR
athletes to the West was therefore completely contrary to the principles
of the entire ideological and organizational foundation of GDR sport as
well as the SED dictatorship itself. Manfred Ewald involuntarily made
it clear just how deeply ingrained this ideology of demarcation was in
the run-up to the Olympic Games in Calgary in 1988. The West German
news magazine Der Spiegel published a confi dential directive addressed
to sport functionaries and trainers in which the martial Cold War sce-
narios were redrawn and a call was made to “reaffi rm and refresh the
principle images of the enemy” in the minds of athletes.^75 When the text
was made public, it created a political sports scandal, especially since the