The Race Against the Stasi

by Herbie Sykes

  Nowhere in the world was sport more politicised than in the GDR, and Täve’s ideological conviction and engaging character were among the most potent propaganda tools at the party’s disposal. His victories belonged to everyone: to the farmers and factory workers, to the teachers and their children, to doctors, mothers and labourers. Above all they belonged to and were forged by revolutionary socialism, and both he and the party delighted in articulating the fact. While dictatorships of all hues have traditionally used outstanding sportsmen as political blunt instruments, none were exploited more effectively than Täve.

  The winner of the 1956 Peace Race, Warsaw’s Stanisław Królak, became a lifelong hero for allegedly having walloped a Russian rider with his bike pump. Unsubstantiated legend has it that the Russian riders were throwing their weight around in general, and threatening one of the Polish team in particular. Królak therefore defended his colleague (ergo Polish honour) with the only weapon at his disposal, his pump. All of Warsaw proclaimed his win, and the humble bike pump became the symbol of the Peace Race in Poland.

  That the story of the pump has zero basis in fact is indicative of just how important the Peace Race was, and how persuasive its legend would remain. Królak was adamant that he never hit the guy, but his denials fell on deaf ears. The Polish public so wanted to believe that he’d stood up to the occupying force that he gave up arguing in the end.

  Stanisław Królak would become a fabled figure in Polish sporting lore, but his yellow jersey, like the blue one of the 1953 GDR team, was also a major political happening. His triumphant return to Warsaw brought them out in their multitudes and, just as significantly, contributed to the groundswell of anti-Moscow sentiment already being fermented. Bolesław Bierut, Poland’s ‘Little Stalin’, had died two months earlier, and the battle to succeed him was raging. The proletariat wanted the moderate Władisław Gomułka installed, but the party apparatchiks favoured a hard-line Stalinist named Edward Ochab. The country was headed towards tipping point, and Królak and his pump were a major contributory factor in what would follow. The Poznań uprising of 28–30 June allegedly cost the lives of more than a hundred Polish civilians, among them a thirteen-year-old boy named Romek Strzałkowski. Russian tanks smashed the revolution, and an atrocious twenty-five-year media embargo saw to it that the massacre was largely forgotten in the west. However, Stanisław Królak’s name, like that of poor Romek Strzałkowski, became furniture in his countrymen’s headspace. Later that autumn the Budapest uprising was similarly crushed, and five years later the Berlin Wall hermetically sealed the fate of millions of Central and Eastern Europeans.

  The year 1972 saw Vlastimil Moravec win arguably the greatest, most emblematic Peace Race of all. With Czech hearts broken by the Prague Spring, he traded the yellow jersey four times with the Soviet Władisław Neljubin. Finally, aided by a coalition of the willing – and by the team-mate who brought Neljubin off as he sprinted for a prime which would likely have won him the race – he prevailed by just two seconds. The average speed of that Peace Race was 42.6kph. Meanwhile Eddy Merckx, crushing all comers at a turgid Giro, did so at 36.1kph. Cycling people are for ever invoking the great battles between him and Gimondi, Coppi and Bartali, Anquetil and Poulidor. However, as regards drama, malevolence and pure sporting theatre, nothing the west ever witnessed came remotely close.

  As Moscow arm-wrestled Washington and subjugated Prague and Warsaw, and as Berlin squabbled with Bonn, the Peace Race, too, began to accumulate masses of geopolitical baggage. Though conceived in the spirit of détente, it had been predicated upon and rooted in the ideological battlegrounds of Central Europe. As such it evolved into their perfect sporting metaphor: a sporting cold war within the Cold War. A beautiful, utopian idea, it was no more than a mirror on the maelstrom which had created it, and which inevitably contaminated it. How, given the unique context in which it was set, could it be otherwise?

  Though cycling’s popularity would wax and wane over the decades, it’s undeniable that the Peace Race was a towering sporting edifice. Further, the bike-racing culture which created great post-communism roadmen like Jan Ulrich, Eric Zabel and Tony Martin has its roots not in the reasoned, centralist unified Germany of the twenty-first century. Their successes, and those of dozens like them, were conceived in a very different time, in a very different country. They were made, emphatically and unequivocally, in the German Democratic Republic.

  That, at least, was the bones of it. Or so it seemed.

  In scanning the runners and riders of the 1964 Peace Race I stumbled across a familiar looking name. I had an idea I’d seen Dieter Wiedemann elsewhere, and so it was. Wiedemann, it transpired, was not only Wolfgang Lötzsch’s cousin, but had ridden the 1967 Tour de France. He’d been supporting Hennes Junkermann, an outstanding stage racer from the Rhineland, and had been present when Tom Simpson rode himself to death on Mont Ventoux.

  But the Tour, very obviously, had taken place on the other side of the Berlin Wall. It had been a national event, and Dieter Wiedemann had ridden it for the Federal Republic of Germany. He’d ridden it for capitalism and that, given that he was from the east, was a technical, practical and administrative impossibility. We set to trying to find him, and to finding out how he’d done it.

  Eventually we tracked him down in a small village in northern Bavaria. In the first instance he told us that he doesn’t speak to journalists about it. He said that he never has done and that, almost fifty years on, he wasn’t about to start. This explained why there is virtually no information about him online, and nor, for that matter, in print. It also implied that he must have had a very great deal to talk about, and so I persevered. Eventually, after several phone calls and a great deal of back and forth in the Wiedemann family, Dieter agreed to meet me.

  This is what happened next.

  THE RACE AGAINST THE STASI

  DIETER

  You ask why, now, after fifty years?

  My story is unusual and quite complicated. I wasn’t prepared for it to be distilled down to a column in a tabloid newspaper or a page in a cycling magazine, because that would be to misrepresent what actually happened. The important thing for me is that we do it in its entirety, and that partly explains why I’ve never spoken about it before. I’ll tell you the story, but I’m not interested in telling half of it.

  When the Wall came down I thought about it quite a lot. The Stasi file was there in Berlin, available to view, but ultimately I decided it was best left behind. Sylvia and I reasoned that opening it could only cause more pain, and we’d had more than enough pain. I couldn’t change what was in there, so we decided that no good could come of it.

  So we got on with our lives, but then out of the blue you came along and said you wanted to do this book. We spoke about it as a family, and we came to the conclusion that it’s time. The world is different now, and the context is different.

  My problem is that I’m seventy-three years old, and I still don’t know my history. I know a version of my life, but I also know that there’s probably another one in a filing cabinet in Berlin. So in a sense the Stasi created another Dieter Wiedemann, and he and I existed in parallel. We knew the same people and places, and the truth of it is that I’ve never really been free of him. He’s been shadowing me for over fifty years, and until I know his story I can never fully understand my own. Life goes on, yes, but if I’m honest you never truly leave it behind. You don’t so much carry it around with you as it becomes part of who you are.

  Regarding the file I have no idea what we’ll find or who we’ll find. I have an idea about what might be in there, and that one person in particular that I was very close to was informing on me. Equally I’ve no doubt that a lot of the people who passed through my life back then were Stasi. The law of averages suggests it can’t realistically be otherwise, simply because of my circumstances. Again I have my suspicions about who, but until we see the file we won’t know.

  So the best thing is that we make a start. We’ll tell you abou
t our lives as we lived them back then, and when we finish we’ll go to Berlin. We’ll get the file and find out about my other life, the one I wasn’t privy to.

  1 The Socialist Unity Party. The GDR was notionally a multi-party state, with SED leading a coalition. In reality, however, the four so-called ‘Bloc Parties’ had no power. Communist rule was written into the constitution, and only once did Parliament fail to rubberstamp the dictates of the Politburo. That was in 1972, an issue of conscience over abortion.

  2 The first edition was organised by Głos Ludu.

  3 Wyścig Pokoju in Polish, Závod Míru in Czech.

  4 Prior to the 1951 race there had been serious talk of abolishing the yellow jersey altogether. The notion was that its presence was a catalyst for individualism, anathema to the socialist sporting model.

  THE FIRST LIFE OF DIETER WIEDEMANN

  (and the Fourth)

  SYLVIA

  All I know is that my paternal grandparents came from Czechoslovakia. They were from Carlsbad, in the Sudetenland, but they were deported at the end of the war. All the ethnically German people were expelled from Czechoslovakia, so there were millions of homeless people roaming around. You hear terrible stories about families walking for hundreds of kilometres through the winter, killing squads, people starving to death and suchlike. I really don’t know what happened to mine, though, because all the information from that time is lost.

  What I do know is that they made their way to a town called Giessen, fifty kilometres north of Frankfurt. There was a big textile industry there, and my grandfather was a tailor. So it could be that somebody told my grandfather that it would be a good place for him to find work, but I really can’t be sure.

  Their son – my father – was called Peter Hermann. He was twenty-four when the war ended, but he didn’t go as far north as Giessen. He stopped just across the Czech/German border, in a small town in Bavaria. The place is called Mitterteich, and as I understand it a lot of refugees stayed around there. I guess they were hoping they’d be allowed to go home, and they probably felt safer there because it was in the American Zone.

  Anyway, that’s where he met my mum. Her name was Ilse Potthast and she was a war widow. She’d married a guy from Cologne, but then he’d gone to the front and hadn’t come home. When he was killed she’d been alone, so she’d gone back to Mitterteich to be with her family again.

  During the war Cologne had been heavily bombed, and apparently my mum had been badly traumatised by it. They told her she’d never be able to have children, so I think that when she came home she just wanted to enjoy herself a little bit. I think she and my dad had some fun together, because she was much older than him. She was thirty and he was twenty-five, and I think it was a bit of a shock when I came along. I was born on 4 June 1946. It’s an easy date to remember: 4-6-4-6.

  The following May I got a little brother, and his name was Roland. One of my earliest memories is of being a bridesmaid, carrying my mum’s veil. As far as I know she hadn’t really wanted to marry, but if you had kids back then you had to. They didn’t let unmarried couples rent, so it was the only way to get a place to live.

  So I don’t know much, but I know that I grew up in Mitterteich, with Roland and with my mum and dad. I also know that my destiny was written in Giessen, but I’ll explain why later on.

  DIETER

  My mum was called Marianne Lang and my dad was called Karl Wiedemann. She was twenty-eight when I was born, but he was thirty-seven. My mum worked as a machinist in a textile factory, and my dad did coachworks.

  I was born on 17 June 1941, in Flöha, a town of about 12,000 people near Chemnitz. We lived in a tiny two-roomed flat. We cooked, ate and washed in the kitchen, and we lived and slept in the other room. There were four families living in our building, and we shared two toilets. We had electricity and running water, but it wasn’t hot water. It was the post-war GDR, so it was a very basic existence.

  When I was four my brother was born, and his name was Eberhard. The flat was just too small then, and eventually they gave us a new one on Rudolf-Breitscheid-Strasse.1 It still didn’t have hot water, but it had a bedroom. We had a radio, but there was no TV back then. I was given one of those much later on.

  One of the more vivid memories I have is of the whole class going out to the fields to collect Colorado beetles on my birthday. They told us that the Americans had dropped them because they wanted to destroy our crops so that we’d starve. There were no pesticides, so we picked the beetles off by hand. When we’d picked them off the potatoes we would put them in jars. We thought it was great.

  NEUES DEUTSCHLAND

  ORGAN DES ZENTRALKOMITEES DER SOZIALISTISCHEN EINHEITSPARTEI DEUTSCHLANDS

  In the villages of Ahlbeck, Heringsdorf, Seabad Bansin, Zinnowitz, Zempin and Kölpin, Colorado potato beetles have recently been found washed up on the beach. Since the beetle is unable to survive in water, they could only have been dropped on to the coastal region overlooking the sea.

  The discovery of potato beetles on the coast of the district of Usedom provides further proof, for those who have yet to recognise the common methods of the Anglo-American warmongers, of the enormity of their crime. The motives driving the US imperialists are not hard to recognise.

  With the support of the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies, the GDR has rebuilt from the chaos of 1945 on its own, and thereby obtained independence. The rapid upward trend in the economy, and increasing prosperity in the republic, has convinced more and more of the West German population that the path we are treading is the correct one. Thus the concept of the Anglo-American warmongers is thoroughly spoiled, and so they try to disrupt the forces of peace by resorting to the most reprehensible means. The gangsters will not achieve their objective.

  Many hands clamour to take part in the fight against the ‘Americabeetle’, as the population has taken to calling it. Were it not for the American crime, they’d be free to perform other tasks. Moreover the 14.5 million marks which the government used to introduce measures against the Americabeetle could be used to benefit us, for kindergartens and recreation centres.

  Reprinted from ‘Crimes committed in the fear of peace’, 17 June 1950

  SYLVIA

  At the beginning there was nothing to buy, and it was just a question of survival. It was a battle to put food on the table, but as I grew up it got better. My dad always said we had been lucky to be in the American Zone,2 not the Russian one. The Americans had a big military base about forty kilometres away, at Grafenwöhr.

  The American soldiers used to have huge cars … Chevrolets I think they called them. Then sometimes they would drive through town in their jeeps. We’d run along after them and they’d throw chocolate and chewing gum to us. They’d laugh at us because they thought we were funny, and we would be laughing as well.

  They had things we’d never seen before. There was cheddar cheese, hot-dog sausages in cans, ketchup … We’d heard about ketchup before, but we’d never seen it. You could spread it on your bread and butter with sugar, and it was made by Heinz. We thought that was just fantastic, you know?

  The American soldiers were much more handsome. They were always smiling, and their uniforms were much nicer than the German ones. Their kids always had the best clothes, and when we saw them sitting in the car with their parents we thought they looked perfect, like perfect little dolls.

  Our neighbours had a daughter the same age as me, and we used to pretend we were the wives of American officers. They sounded funny, and we used to try to copy their accents.

  DIETER

  We were lucky because my father had inherited a smallholding. He grew fruit and vegetables in it, kept chickens and bred angora rabbits. My mum would sell or trade the eggs and wool. It may sound ridiculous today, but those rabbits were vital to our wellbeing.

  There was rationing, and that created a barter economy. People would buy things they didn’t need and use them to bargain for things they did. You mostly traded food with oth
er families. So for example my mum might swap our salad for eggs, and then we had things like strawberries and raspberries. Things like that – the things you couldn’t get in the shops – were quite valuable, so my mum used to do well out of them. Fruit was very scarce, and so was meat. That was the thing with the smallholding, and with the rabbits. It was because of them that we never went hungry. I knew a lot of kids who did, though.

  So in answer to your question, yes, I think I had a settled childhood. We were quite a happy family, I enjoyed school and my grades were generally decent. We didn’t really have anything, but that didn’t matter because neither did anyone else.