On the very weekend of the UPI interview with Kukushkin in Rome, the news back home included reports of racial strife in Jacksonville, Florida, where blacks had staged sit-ins to end segregation at downtown variety stores. “Angry mobs of club-swinging whites clashed with Negroes in the streets of downtown Jacksonville, setting off a chain reaction that brought more violence and bloodshed,” a report in the Los Angeles Times began. More than fifty people were hurt, and forty-eight blacks had been arrested, compared to fourteen whites.
The blacks on the U.S. Olympic team knew all about sit-ins and the violent reaction to them. The protests in Jacksonville were part of a movement that was sweeping across the South. Ed Temple and his Tigerbelles had been on the Tennessee State campus that May when white supremacists dynamited the home of a black attorney, Z. Alexander Looby, who was among the leaders of a movement to integrate downtown lunch counters in Nashville. The sit-ins there led to a boycott of downtown department stores that nearly brought Nashville business to a halt. “I mean, when they had the boycott about not buying, nobody went downtown and bought, and there wasn’t no doubt about that,” Temple remembered. “Everybody participated in that.”
In the interview with the wire service in Rome, Kukushkin took it one step further, arguing that blacks had “special physical endowments for sports.” Knowing exactly what to do with that potentially explosive quote, the UPI reporter, Tony Austin, walked over to the American compound in the village and read the line to a group of black athletes.
“Oh, sure, John Thomas over there has a third arm,” said Bo Roberson, the Cornell-educated long jumper.
“It’s nonsense to say there is any physiological difference between Negroes and whites,” Thomas said.
Ira Davis, a triple jumper, said track and field was a means to an end.
What is the end? Austin asked.
The group fell silent, until Roberson answered for all of them.
“The end is equality.”
8
UPSIDE DOWN
MANFRED EWALD, deputy chief of mission of the unified German team, was seen walking through the Olympic Village with a bouquet of red roses one afternoon during the first week of the Rome Games. That the flowers were for a woman athlete was no big deal. But when, with a formal bow of respect, the East German sports official presented the roses to Wiltrud Urselmann, a silver medalist in the 200-meter breaststroke, his gesture took on a larger meaning. Urselmann was from Krefeld, a city along the Rhine River in West Germany. Winning isn’t everything, but success in the Olympics could have a calming effect on East-West tensions within the German delegation in Rome. As a column in the West German newspaper Die Welt put it, “Medals reconcile. They make the athletes talkative and even loosen up tense muscles in functionaries’ faces.”
To a brilliant old crank like A. J. Liebling, the first days of the Olympic fortnight were mostly sideshow. He cared nothing about cycling, and could be stirred neither by Jensen’s death nor Larson’s larcenous loss. “To give a technical illusion that Olympic competitions were taking place, they put on preliminaries in various fringe sports—field hockey, water polo, fencing, and the like—at outlying Olympic installations,” Liebling informed his New Yorker readers. “Of these, swimming was the only one with general international appeal, and there has consequently been more copy filed on the swimming here than on any similar event since the efforts of the Titanic survivors to remain afloat.”
Defying the expectations of many experts, a large share of that early copy was about the Germans, not so much Urselmann’s second-place finish in the breaststroke as the stunning performance of Ingrid Kraemer in diving. And Kraemer was not just German, she was East German, the daughter of a Filmosto film factory foreman and party member from Dresden. Hailed by Life magazine as “the first dazzling surprise of the games,” her success reinforced the conciliatory power of medals and went a long way toward explaining the rosy collegiality of Comrade Ewald.
Kraemer was not entirely unknown when she arrived in Rome. At age seventeen, still in high school, she had emerged from competitions in Europe as someone to watch, especially on the 3-meter springboard. Her outstanding performance during the tense “exclusion competitions” to determine places on the unified German team prompted one judge to tell her she could “make it to the top in the Olympics.” But the U.S. divers had never heard of her, and diving had been their domain for decades. Since the 1924 Olympics in Paris, of the twenty-one medals available in springboard diving, the Americans had won nineteen—all but a single silver to a Frenchwoman and a bronze to a Canadian. The dominance in platform diving was nearly as complete, with U.S. women sweeping all the golds and silvers during that period. Caroline Smith, Elizabeth Becker, Dorothy Poynton, Helen Meany, Georgia Coleman, Marjorie Gestring, Vicki Draves, Pat McCormick—these were the golden names of women’s diving, all American.
Kraemer knew less about the Americans than they knew about her. She had never seen them on film, had not been able to study their technique, knew nothing about their prowess. All she knew about diving came from her trainers in Dresden and Leipzig (where she had to go for 10-meter diving; there was no high platform in her hometown) and some Soviet divers. To calm her nerves when she arrived in Rome, she tamped down her own expectations. “I really hadn’t dared to hope that I would win,” she said later. “I tried not to think about winning. I wanted to do my very best, but I prevented putting myself under the pressure of wanting a medal. I had learned that a wrong movement could easily happen, and tried to leave everything open for myself.”
But in her first event, the 3-meter springboard, she made no wrong moves and demolished the American winning streak, nailing jump after jump and amassing a point lead so wide “that she could have jumped into the water with only a little grace in the last round, and she would have won the gold medal,” a Die Welt account noted. She seemed steady and composed, and she had a certain self-correcting magic to her technique. Whatever minor flaws one of her dives might suggest in midair, Kraemer invariably adjusted and pierced the water cleanly. “We would simply fold together in distorted jumps, which Ingrid manages to get inimitably into the water,” said her teammate Ingeborg Busch of Mannheim. The American divers, led by Paula Jean Myers Pope, a bronze medalist in Melbourne, sprang higher off the board and had as much or more grace twisting in midair, but they lacked Kraemer’s downward precision and created more splash on entry.
If Kraemer appeared unflappable, her composure came only after a long and difficult struggle against fear. She had first jumped off a low board at age five at a vacation camp run for the children of factory workers, before she even knew how to swim. When she was eleven, she started practicing with the Dresden diving club at a pool that was used by the Soviet Army in the mornings. Three or four times a week, after lunch, she and other young divers gathered at Postplatz Square and rode a tram out to the pool on the outskirts of Dresden, not coming home until evening. Reinhard Kunert, her trainer, noticed immediately that she was unusually flexible and had beautiful foot movements, important characteristics for a championship diver. Yet the very act of sending her body into the water scared her. “I had real problems of fear in my first years,” she said later. “I wasn’t courageous at all. I had to work hard on it and only bit by bit managed to overcome it. In the beginning the fear was so strong my father made me a special vest of rubber foam so I wouldn’t feel the pain hitting the water on my back or my stomach.”
Even as the fear diminished, it never went away and followed her all the way to Rome. By then she had come to accept the irony that fear was an important part of her success. Her anxiety about hurting herself in the water forced her to concentrate on the precision of her movements. She went over them again and again in her mind, a form of internal visualization and self-protection. Just as fear helped her, so too, apparently, did a physical defect. It turned out that the extraordinary flexibility that made her movements look so smooth came as a result of her abnormally sensitive soft body tissue
. Only decades later would she learn that her condition might have made it unwise for her ever to have taken part in competitive sports.
In the years after the Rome Olympics, propelled by a state-run athletic factory that relied on illicit drugs and hormone treatments, women from East Germany would surge to the front in swimming and other sports, but in 1960 they were still scrappy underdogs. Until Kraemer came along, the only Eastern zone German athletes to win gold medals were boxer Wolfgang Behrendt at Melbourne and speed skater Helga Haase and ski jumper Helmut Recknagel at the 1960 Winter Games in Squaw Valley.
Any medal showing was heralded by the Communist press as an ideological miracle, but Kraemer’s performance sent the journalists from East Germany into evocative flourishes that outdid even Gian Paolo Ormezzano’s Fellini-esque depiction of the 100-meter freestyle. “Not long ago she was leaning at the fence, her shining turquoise bathrobe completely closed, the hood over her head, hands folded, unconcerned like one of the countless unnamed mermaids who are leaving the water in thousands of pools all over the world, wrapping themselves in a towel,” began the Neues Deutschland report describing Kraemer’s final springboard dive. “But suddenly she threw the bathrobe away, the body in the blue swimsuit became tense, and like a ‘dry swimmer’ she adumbrated the movements of her jump once, twice, just as she does for every jump.”
Then she mounted the steps to the three-meter tower. And while seven judges, protected from the blistering sun by colored sunshades, directed their attention to her, while on the large electric scoreboard on the other end of the pool her name shiningly appeared, and while the ten thousand spectators in the light-flooded Stadio del Nuoto held their breaths, she swung into the air.
And suddenly she was the one who was ahead of everybody else, she was the superior, the unmatched, the best springboard diver of the world who was about to perform the triumph of her life. Like an arrow she shot into the water, which surface willingly granted her admission, and when her young, fresh face reappeared on the surface, her blonde hair seemed to shine twice as much as usual. The confirmation of the electronic brain was a mere formality. Jubilation in the ranks, the unending chants of overwhelmed camp-followers, had long since announced it: Ingrid Kraemer, the 17-year-old high school girl from the German Democratic Republic, emerged from the water as a golden girl.
Accounts in the American press inevitably called Kraemer a fräulein and issued her a new nickname, the Dresden Doll. One of her Olympic coaches, Heinz Kitzig, said he expected her to win but knew that Western journalists would be shocked. “The world does not know much about us anymore since what they call the Iron Curtain has cut us off,” he said. When one writer asked whether Dresden was in East Germany, Kitzig responded tersely, “It is the German Democratic Republic.” Although the U.S. string of gold medals was broken, Paula Jean Myers Pope, who finished second, was not disappointed. “She clearly outdove me on springboard,” Pope said later of Kraemer. “I received the silver medal on springboard and was very, very pleased.” Part of her satisfaction came in knowing that platform was her better event and that she could recoup the gold there.
GERMANY IN the late summer of 1960 was defined by the cold war but also by the old war—fifteen years after the fall of the Third Reich. Arriving in Berlin that August on a writing tour of Europe’s great cities undertaken for the Sunday Times, Ian Fleming, the British spy novelist, was struck by the “asphalt-gray” dimness of both the Western and Eastern sectors. He thought the city smelled “of cigars and boiled cabbage.” Fifty percent of it had been strafed during the war, he wrote, and even now there were physical reminders everywhere of “the great corporal punishment meted out upon the people who have caused more pain and grief in the world than any other nation in this century.” As Fleming drove through the streets of the western sector, he half-expected “at any moment to see the town crumble away again in smoke.”
The old rubble fascinated Fleming, who felt a lingering unease about the Germans. He had lost his father in World War I and a younger brother in World War II and said he still had a recurring nightmare of a future German rocket hissing toward London. By his account, there remained 70 million cubic meters of rubble in Berlin piled into Monte Klamotten, rubbish mountains, the entirety known as Hitler’s Collected Works.
But what Fleming found most engaging about Berlin was the scent of espionage. Since the publication of Casino Royale in 1953, he had written seven books featuring James Bond, the most illustrious secret agent of twentieth-century pop fiction, and here was a place teeming with would-be 007s. Berlin was a world-class capital of intrigue, divided East and West as the country itself was divided, but with the city’s Western half removed from the rest of West Germany, alone and surrounded, a hundred miles inside East German territory, connected to the West only by the narrow ribbon of an autobahn.
As he explored the fringes of the Berlin underworld, Fleming, who spoke fluent German, encountered a spook who told him there were an estimated ten thousand Communist agents slipping into West Berlin and an equal number of spies infiltrating the East. Just the day before the Olympics began in Rome, East Germany announced the arrest of 147 members of an alleged espionage ring “in the pay of the American secret intelligence service.” Once it had been easy to buy off East German agents with promises of money and freedom, Fleming learned, but now that seemed to be more difficult. In retrospect, the paths of history can appear obvious, but in the divided Germany of August 1960, no one knew who would win the cold war. Some believed the balance was shifting eastward. “They greatly prefer the symmetry of Communism and the planned economy, particularly when the plans seem to be successful,” one agent in Berlin’s Western sector said of the Soviet zone. “And the Sputnik and so on have helped here. They are quite sure they are on the winning side; that Russia is stronger than the West.”
At the White House that summer, within the intelligence community, there was a growing sense that East Germany was “teetering on the brink of stability,” in the words of a National Security Agency report. A long-held hope of reunifying the German people under a Western democratic government seemed to be dimming. The Soviet Union, which oversaw the Eastern zone, was threatening to sign a separate peace treaty with the German Democratic Republic (a government not recognized by the U.S. or most Western powers). At the same time, the Soviets also were pushing for the establishment of what they called a “free Berlin”—which the Eisenhower administration saw as another manipulative attempt to bring the entire city under Communist control.
The standoff in Berlin, a city the NSA report described as “one of the most active arenas in the struggle between the Free and Communist worlds,” took another turn on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 30. At the same time that Ingrid Kraemer went for her second gold medal at the swimming stadium in Rome, an event cheered on by German fans from both sides of the ideological divide, the East German government announced a decision to prevent West German citizens from entering East Berlin for five days, starting the following day. East German officials said they felt compelled to impose the ban in response to an imminent gathering in Berlin that would stir political unrest: a homecoming of World War II prisoners of war and relatives of the missing. Always eager to blame West German leaders for the nation’s Nazi past, the East Germans called the old soldiers’ conference “a militaristic and revanchist event of instigation” that could have been conceived by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
The State Department immediately denounced the border closing, asserting that Berlin was not then and never had been on East German soil. The real purpose of the ban, U.S. officials said, was to further isolate West Berlin. It was also seen as part of the larger effort by the East German GDR to force the Western powers to recognize it.
The Orwellian nature of the five-day ban was obvious. Here the East Germans were trying to prevent West Germans from getting in at the same time that their own people were fleeing in record numbers. More than 100,000 refugees from the East had registered i
n West Berlin refugee camps in the first eight months of 1960. The number of refugees in August alone exceeded the previous high figure for that month, August 1953, when refugees had flooded over the line in the aftermath of an uprising. During the first five days of the Summer Olympics in Rome, 4,301 people fled East Berlin. Meanwhile, visitors from the West entering East Berlin—visitors, not refugees—declined steadily that year, down 28 percent in July. To explain this drop, East German officials claimed that West Germany had launched a “Close the Gate” campaign.
“Typical Communist propaganda,” a West German official responded. “Turning things upside down in the usual way.”
Nearly one year later, on the Saturday night of August 12 and Sunday morning of August 13, 1961, the East Germans began constructing the “antifascist protective rampart”—what came to be known as the Berlin Wall, sealing off their side of the city. After that, escape was the only way out.
This was the context of the uneasy show of unity among German Olympians in Rome. A hundred times a day, chief of mission Gerhard Stoeck said, he was asked: How do they live together on the Piazza Grecia, the athletes from East and West? “No incidents,” he would say. “They get along well with each other. I am satisfied.” Heinz Schöbel, an East German official, was struck by a particular display of unity, when he and his West German counterpart issued a joint criticism of Italian officials in the Olympic Village for showing Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia, which depicted the 1936 Games in Berlin and glorified Hitler and his Nazis. Another symbol of the unified effort came from the athletes themselves, when a four-man kayak relay team, two from East Germany, two from West Germany, won the gold medal and posed for pictures arm in arm, smiling. But none of that compared with the public light shining on the diver from Dresden.
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