TY - JOUR
AU - Braun, Jutta
AB - In the light of Mary Fulbrook's study of everyday life in the GDR, this article discusses the issues faced in everyday sport under real Socialism. From the 1970s onwards, mushrooming trendy sports, such as wind-surfing and karate, came up against the narrow-minded and repressive policies of the SED, which were guided by the belief that sport should exist only to serve the Socialist project. The state concentrated its provision exclusively on Olympic sports. Sports considered by the SED to be politically unnecessary were allowed to decay or were banned. In a few cases, however, such as the grass-roots initiative of the Rennsteiglauf in Thringen, social impetus and state controls together produced a workable symbiosis. The football fan culture exposed a gaping hole in the Party's control mechanism. Fans in the GDR were drawn to the successful West German Bundesliga, and countless East German spectators regularly crowded into Eastern European football grounds visited by West German teams. The SED regime took strenuous measures against what they saw as politically objectionable, reckoning fans were in grave danger from keeping company and making common cause with the Other Germany. The issue of the football fan culture revealed that the younger generation, who had grown up within the GDR, had failed to internalize the postulated animosity toward West Germany. This article aims to show that the issues surrounding sport contributed to the ideological schizophrenia which in the end so discredited the regime in the eyes of its citizens that in 1989 they fled in their thousands an Alltag that had become unbearable.
TI - The People's Sport? Popular Sport and Fans in the Later Years of the German Democratic Republic
JF - German History
DO - 10.1093/gerhis/ghp034
DA - 2009-07-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-people-s-sport-popular-sport-and-fans-in-the-later-years-of-the-dcKPGd0aeW
SP - 414
EP - 428
VL - 27
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -