Home and Away: East Germany and the 1972 Olympics in the Age of Ostpolitik

In the 1960s, as the world leant gently towards détente and gradually learnt to live with the post-war status quo, German-German attitudes crystallized out into an intractable and ever irascible stalemate. For Bonn and East Berlin, sport provided front-line action in a general political order that had become increasingly wary of real confrontation. For the superpowers and the majority of their dependents, sport served as a surrogate realm for the playing out and celebration of ideological tensions. For the Germans, by contrast, international sport lived on a much harder edge.
Two defining projects which came to their conclusion in the Federal Republic in 1972 – the Munich Olympics and the SPD’s policy of rapprochement with the East – projected these two perspectives onto each other. As the GDR prepared to humiliate its West German rivals with a display of athletic prowess, it sought to persuade its Eastern allies to boycott any activity that might allow Bonn to capitalize on the symbolic dimension of Olympism. Simultaneously, however, Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik was opening up new avenues of communication and trade across the Eastern block, and casting the GDR’s Olympic plans into a web of difficult negotiations and publicity campaigns in Europe and beyond: from North Korea to Mongolia, Finland to Sudan. At the same time too, the East German public and athletes needed to be persuaded, and, as this presentation explores on the basis of new material, sport generated a series of identity clusters that ran contrary to the most well-planned political intentions.
This paper draws on sources from both Germanies: the 1972 Olympics and related files in Koblenz, Munich, Berlin and Cologne, and the SAPMO and BStU archives of the former East Germany, with special reference to the personal Dynamo sports club file of Erich Mielke, head of the secret police.