Soccer Hooliganism in the German Democratic Republic

Pitch invasions, attacks on referees, running battles between drunken rivals, clashes between police and young fans, racist chanting and railway carriages demolished. These kinds of incidents were not restricted to Western Europe but were part of a common culture of soccer violence which established itself on both sides of the Berlin Wall. Despite concerted efforts by the East German Ministry of State Security (MfS) and the police to curtail footballrelated disorder, disturbances rose from 960 in the 1986-87 to 1,090 in the following season.1 These figures made unwelcome reading for the ruling party, the SED, and its security forces. Not only did soccer hooliganism damage the reputation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) both at home and abroad, it was not even supposed to exist in a society which claimed to have eliminated its preconditions. According to the tenets of MarxistLeninist ideology, antisocial behaviour was rooted in exploitative capitalism and the concomitant social misery of young working-class males. Why football violence and other forms of public disorder were prevalent under state socialism and how they developed in the GDR are the subject of this chapter. In exploring these and other pertinent issues in the history of GDR football, the chapter draws on declassified files held in the central and regional archives of the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the Ministry of State Security of the Former German Democratic Republic (BStU), the Berlin branch of the Federal Archive and the Saxon State Archive Leipzig. These materials, which include reports and analyses by the police, the MfS and the SED Central Committee Department for Sport, provide invaluable insights into official policy-making on, and perceptions of, the hooligan ‘wars’. They are complemented by several recent studies of GDR football, the MfS and football hooliganism, notably those by Baigno and Horn, Braun, Dennis, Leske, Luther, Pleil, Spitzer, Waibel and Willmann. Published recollections by fans and former members of the hooligan scene, as well as the memoirs of sports functionaries, complete the source base.