Precise, truthful retellings prevent the distortion of history that Germans sometimes experience. This doesn’t just apply to the most terrible chapters of the past. The GDR’s secret, criminal state doping is now also not only trivialized by those who have passed away.
Even the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk questioned in a film in 2023 whether doping in the GDR was anything special. As if the filmmaker had quoted a certain Manfred Ewald. In 1985, he had spoken to his Olympic team’s conscience: “Doping exists everywhere.” Ewald was the architect of top-class sports in the GDR, an advocate of pharmacological poisoning when gold was achieved.
“Sports history in court”
It is not surprising that this horrific story has to be told again and again. Otherwise it will be lost, even though scientists demonstrated what happened in state doping decades ago. For this reason alone, the new book “Sports History in Court” by Jutta Braun and René Wiese, which will be presented this Thursday in Erfurt, is important. For the report on “Doping practice and injustice by the Socialist Unity Party in GDR sports”, the historians immersed themselves in the interrogation protocols of the Central Investigation Office for Government and Association Crime, which have still not been fully evaluated.
In the 1990s they interviewed athletes, trainers and doctors, some as witnesses, others as accused. What emerges is the tangible violence of the system in each case, the coercion underlying it, the repression from top to bottom and the enormous loss of control despite Stasi surveillance. Anyone who equates this real manipulation of people from head to toe, from child doping to the inclusion of recreational athletes in the research program, with systemic doping in the West is ignoring the powers of the dictatorship. Their wickedness sometimes made life hell for objectors and, quite deliberately, created enormous fears in those who were fickle.
It would also be fatal to put “sports history on trial” in the closet as a confirming review. It can serve the future. Anyone among the influential politicians who did not take the hint from the Federal Administrative Court in March will find sufficient reasons in the latest presentation to finally address the suffering of doping victims with appropriate legal regulations.
