Part I

It is very tempting to reduce all of the GDR's success in the Olympics from the late 1960s to 1988 to the state's use of anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. The GDR's program for these substances was quite large and substantial. Although other Olympic teams used such substances, the GDR's program eclipsed the other use both in breadth and direct state resources channeled into their development. But steroids and the like are only one part of a much more complex picture of sport inside the GDR, and to focus exclusively on their use obscures a number of other developments inside the GDR's sport program. Moreover, the outsized attention paid to steroids use also neglects the more important question as to why the GDR created such a program in the first place. Steroids were a part of a much larger pastiche of a state-funded and operated programs that increasingly prioritized Olympic sports at the expense of other types of sports. The GDR's status as an Olympic titan as far as medals were concerned, had important international as well as domestic advantages for the ruling SED party.

Like other dictatorships of the twentieth century, the SED recognized that the Olympics were a major propaganda tool to showcase the health and vitality of the nation. Olympians were to be representatives of the nation, and their physical triumphs stood in for the collective health of the nation, thus building on long entrenched discourses on the physical health of the body being synonymous with the larger polity. Both Fascist Italy and the Third Reich pioneered the trend of politicized Olympiads, and the Cold War added further impetus to using triumph in sport as a political triumph.

But even among these contemporaries, the GDR was in a somewhat unique position that made the medal count even more important. German division, which was nominally temporary until a final peace treaty was settled, wrecked havoc with the Olympics. The IOC initially ruled that "Germany" could only have one team, and between 1956-68, Olympians from both Germanies participated in a unified team. This compromise position favored the FRG in many respects as it denuded the publicity of GDR athletic successes and added weight to the FRG's notion that the GDR was a temporary anomaly until a final reunification could take place. The IOC's abandonment of the unified team, which tentatively started in the 1968 games, meant that the GDR could finally compete as its own sovereign state in the 1972 Munich games. These games, held in the GDR's chief ideological competitor, meant that the SED made a deliberate effort to dominate. The timing of the end of the unified team concept was also important. By the late 1960s, it was clear that of the two Germanies, it as the GDR that was the more successful of the two. Although the planned economy had stabilized from the dire days of Ulbricht's Aufbau Sozialismus of the 1950s, the GDR was materially much poorer than its Western rival. The state's international standing had also been greatly damaged by the erection of the Berlin Wall, as well as the association of the SED with other Stalinist hardliners within the Warsaw Pact. International sport thus became one arena in which the GDR could actually "win" against the FRG. The SED leadership did recognize this fact and actively championed it by funneling tremendous resources into its Olympic training programs.

But Olympic-mindedness also had a strong domestic component to it. Beyond the bread and circuses appeal of mass sport, the SED saw sport as a useful tool to shape its domestic population. The USSR provided both a paradigm as well as a rationale for the state to invest money into sports programs. According to Soviet practice, athletics and healthy bodies were barometers of socialism's success via capitalism. The fact that people could devote time to athletics was a sign that the planned economy provided its toilers ample time for leisure and self-improvement. There was a socialist pedagogy to athletics as well, because the team-building nature of athletics helped inculcate class solidarity. Participation in mass sports allegedly helped foster a more healthy population, which would be of utility both in peace and war. The SED imbibed these lessons from the USSR's athletic program and expanded upon it.

One of the crucial innovations of the GDR's sports program was the Spartakiaden, first created in 1965, a series of sports competitions held for GDR children under the auspices of the mass sport collective, Der Deutsche Turn- und Sportbund (DTSB) . Named after the Thracian gladiator, the Spartakiaden became a nation-wide program to get the GDR's youth involved in Olympic events. These sporting competitions became opportunities for localities to engage in a form of boosterism and the state lavished special attention on the ceremonial and mass mobilizing aspects of these competitions. As the Spartakiaden became more regimented, it soon became both a training ground and a scouting opportunity for the GDR's Olympic teams. The mass datasets created by having so many athletes further helped the GDR's state authorities to scientifically pinpoint the physical characteristics of potential Olympians among these children. By 1973, the DTSB had formally allied with the Ministry of Education to form national evaluation and testing plans to identify potential Olympians among primary school students, and prepare them to into the pipeline for full-time training. As mass events, the Spartakiaden became a vital intersection for the pyramid-like structure of training academies, sport schools, and clubs that had ensconced themselves within the GDR's educational system. Spartakiaden success helped potential Olympic athletes advance up the rungs of this pyramid to where they would become a sporting elite.

Medal-winning Olympians were to be state heroes within the GDR and the state lavished both praise for them, as well as various special perks. Again, the timing for this process- the late 1960s- was quite important. As memories of the Third Reich and the war faded, the pantheon of socialist heroes like Ernst Thälmann appeared more geriatric and remote figures for the average GDR Staatsbürger. The regime did celebrate figures like Che or Lumumba, but there was a dearth of postwar Germans that the SED could be comfortable in elevating to the pantheon of socialist heroes. Stakhanovism was a limited option as its prolonged use engendered a certain cynicism about the planned economy. Olympians, however, fit into this void quite well. They were to be socialist heroes of a new mold that symbolized the successes of the GDR. State propaganda was not just about the medal count, but also stressed how the winners were exemplars of the GDR's own brand of socialism. The SED not only prioritized beating the FRG, but also its own superpower patron the USSR.

These massive investments in Olympic gold were not without their costs though. Aside from the health issues associated with steroid abuse, GDR Olympians were under intense pressure to succeed and were under very tight surveillance from the MfS. The scientifically-geared process of identifying and culling out potential Olympians at a very young age worked well for sports like gymnastics or track & field, but such technical-scientific approaches tended to fail for more complicated team sports. There was also considerable friction between various power blocs within the GDR over the increasing importance paid to Olympic training. Margot Honecker, as Minister of People's Education, successfully fought against the DTSB efforts to screen for gymnasts and figure skaters among kindergartners as an unwelcome diversion for youth education.

The Olympic-mindedness of the SED also was a source for increasing discontent among the wider GDR population. The SED's 1969 Leistungssportbeschluss (Resolution on Achievement Sports) had already decreed that international sporting competitions would receive state priority for funding. This meant that in the stalled planned economy, resources for equipment and facilities for non-Olympian sports grew shorter. Thus while the GDR became a powerhouse in some Olympic events, its popular domestic sporting scene became quite anemic. By the 1980s, local facilities were often dilapidated save for a few special clubs that enjoyed state patronage. These tensions boiled over in the GDR football scene, with regional rivalries becoming quite sharp, especially between Saxony and Berlin when the MfS-backed Dynamo club ordered Dresden's best players to move to Berlin in 1954. Dynamo became one of villains in GDR football circles with rumors that the MfS pressured referees and used other unsavory tactics to ensure it won its matches. Far from encouraging socialist harmony, non-Olympic sport was doing the opposite by the 1980s.