Goodbye Lenin (and Cottbus)
By: Dan | June 6th, 2009
As 2009 progresses, it seems that nearly every day that goes by is the anniversary of a significant landmark of East Germany’s dissolution. For the football clubs of the former GDR, marking this anniversary by seeing their only Bundesliga representative, Energie Cottbus, unceremoniously discarded from the top flight by Nurnberg is a coincidence cruel enough to seem by design. German reunification has been far from easy for everyone involved, but the Eastern football clubs might be forgiven if they look back with a greater sense of ostalgie than most. In many ways, it has been a strange twenty years.
German reunification occurred soon after Franz Beckenbauer managed West Germany to the 1990 World Cup title. Beckenbauer’s response was strictly football related of course; he declared that the incorporation of the East’s best players would make the new German national team unbeatable. Oddly enough, the Kaiser’s innocent optimism closely mirrored the debate around reunification that was taking place in the real world. Beckenbauer’s image of a unified, unbeatable Germany was the exact worry, both in terms of historical guilt and future risk, which many outside observers fretted over. As it turned out, unifying the two Germanys was not so simple.
In the grammar school I attended, it was a common occurrence that we would be corrected for referring to the two Germanys as ‘Germany’ and ‘East Germany,’ the implication being that West Germany was the real Germany and that the East was the geographical equivalent of a designer knock off. Apparently, this was as much of a problem in Germany as it was in American classrooms. The challenges that bringing the GDR into Western politics and daily life presented were as complex as they were numerous. It should suffice to say, for brevity’s sake, that Eastern and Western expectations about how unification would occur did not exactly converge. Views were exchanged and resentments were formed.
Football did provide insight into some of the problems. The clubs of the former GDR suffered immensely from unification. Some suffering was inevitable. The transition from a wholly state supported entity to the hyper competitive world of football finance was never going to be easy, but being stripped of all their top players, youth systems, and anything else that might make them slightly competitive or marketable certainly didn’t help matters. The clubs that only lost players might be considered lucky. Dynamo Dresden, a club with historical pedigree and real potential to succeed in the new Germany, spent the first handful of reunification seasons struggling in the Bundesliga, controlled by a massively corrupt owner before ending up relegated and in a financial mess. Today you would have to be a very devoted follower of lower league German football to keep aware of what former GDR giants like Dynamo Dresden, Lokomotive Leipzig, Carl Zeiss Jena, Dynamo Berlin, or Magdeburg are up to on a weekly basis.
The two clubs, Energie Cottbus and Hansa Rostock, which have in recent years represented the old East in the Bundesliga exist in rather different circumstances. The preeminent German football writer, Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger sums up their position perfectly. He has pointed out that as lower lights of Eastern football, these clubs didn’t have much of anything to plunder when the wall came down. They more or less developed naturally as any other lower division club would. For clubs of their size and resources, bouncing between the first and second divisions isn’t really a desperate state of affairs, but being associated with the collective history of the entire East seems to attach an undeserved air of disappointment to nearly everything they do.
I don’t blame people who still retain a strong sense of being East Germans for rallying around them, but this does beg the question if a club like Cottbus, not one of the lamented, fallen giants by any means, should be considered a GDR club at all in anything but the most literal sense. I suppose as long as the political problems that surround the East still exist, the dearth of Eastern clubs in the Bundesliga is just going to remain one more point of contention.
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