SPORTS AND SOCIETY 515
SED had just promised to “dismantle the enemy images” in the wake of
Honecker’s visit to West Germany in September 1987.^76 As head of the
NOC, Ewald valiantly tried to play down this text as a purely “provocative
invention” at a press conference held to present the GDR Olympic team
at the end of January in 1988.^77 The GDR sports leadership fi nally found
itself caught up in a propaganda predicament of its own making: on the
one hand, it had stuff ed its athletes full of well-practiced infl ammatory
rhetoric and untruths, but then it found itself lying again as it tried to
deny the whole thing with a red face after having been caught out by the
West. Given the particularly hard line of ideological belligerency held by
the GDR sports leadership,^78 as well as the fear that any permeability of
the Wall would create an undesirable domino eff ect in terms of an exo-
dus of athletes to the West, it seemed impossible that the kind of reforms
that had taken place in other Eastern European states would come about
in East Germany. Only in the closest circles of the polibüro could Erich
Honecker concede with a wink in his eye in 1989 that “we also actually
have professional sports. We don’t really have to get upset about this.
Soccer players are bought. The Oberliga players are indeed professional
athletes.”^79 Yet the SED could not, nor did it want to, take up with the
suggestion made public by the Werder Bremen coach Otto Rehhagel in
1986, as well as other off ers in kind, to set up an international exchange
of players between East and West Germany—akin to what was already
being done in other Eastern European states—which Rehhagel main-
tained would have advantages for both sides.^80 The SED and its sports
leadership had seen elite sports throughout the decades as serving the
primary purpose of state representation and, above all, drawing a line of
demarcation between East and West Germany. As a result, they could not
really get their heads around one of the basic principles of professional
sports events. Manfred Ewald, for example, could not understand why
“players such as Lendl in tennis and others compete against their own
countrymen in sports contests.” Indeed, he claimed “this doesn’t really
make any sense.”^81
In its last years, however, the GDR did come to terms with one as-
pect of this commercialization of sports—namely, advertising income.
For the fi rst time, an “advertising department” was created within the
DTSB of the GDR that was responsible for coordinating the marketing of
GDR sports in the West. According to the organ of the FDJ (Free German
Youth), the Junge Welt, the GDR hoped to make a total of 130 million
marks in 1988 through sports advertising.^82 Interestingly, however, this
advertising was mostly for products that could not be bought in the GDR.
The TV coverage of championships and international matches, for exam-
ple, featured banner advertising for Agfa and Kodak, as well as Bauhaus