In Wettkampf der Systeme, Jutta Braun explores the highly intertwined nature of politics and sport in divided Germany, focusing on the specific nature of sport in both West Germany and East Germany, as well as German-German relations through sports. As the title indicates, the “competition of systems” is key to her analysis, which explores how both East Germany and West Germany used sports as a way to represent themselves as “the better Germany” (8). Braun's book functions on two levels. First, she presents a concise yet comprehensive reconstruction of sport in both Germanies, including organizational structures at both the grassroots and elite levels, German-German sport interactions, the two Germanies in the international elite sporting arena, doping, individual athletes experiences of emigration, the reunification of sport in 1990 and thereafter, and memory culture. Second, she establishes the state of sports history scholarship since German reunification.
Two strengths of the book are Braun's consideration of change over time from the immediate postwar era through German reunification, as well as her consistent blending of broad descriptions with revealing anecdotes. Braun effectively outlines the core structures of sports in both Germanies, demonstrating the fundamental distinction between West German sport, based on the autonomous “Verein” as the core unit of recreational activity and understood as apolitical, and East German sport, highly centralized by the state and understood as explicitly political. As Braun shows, East German leaders harshly acted against citizens perceived as embracing the pre-Nazi Vereine, even sentencing two officials of the Sportgemeinschaft Dresden-Friedrichstadt to five years of prison in 1958 for illegally planning an anniversary celebration for the pre-East German Dresdner Sportclub (19). During the reunification process more than three decades later, in what Braun describes as a caesura for East German civil society, East Germany restored the right to form autonomous associations, thereby transforming sports at the grassroots. In the summer of 1990, for example, BSG Chemie Schwarza refounded itself as Sportverein Schwarza 1883 (132). In some cases, however, East German names proved to have longer-lasting resonance. The East German football club Lokomotive Leipzig was refounded as VfB Leipzig in 1991, yet struggled to gain footing, dissolved, and later reconstituted itself once again under its East German name of Lokomotive Leipzig (133).
In addition to examining the distinct features of the West German and East German sport systems, Braun also highlights German-German relations through sport. Frustratingly for East German leaders, East German fans often supported West German athletes when German teams competed against each other. During an October 1956 match between 1. FC Kaiserslautern and SC Wismut Karl-Marx Stadt in the East German city of Leipzig, ticket demand exceeded supply by 400,000 tickets, largely motivated by East German fan enthusiasm for West German footballer Fritz Walter, the star of West Germany's 1954 winning World Cup team. In the aftermath, East Germany pulled back from competition against West German teams (36). East German authorities also confiscated banners made by East German fans to cheer on the West German team FC Bayern Munich in a September 1979 UEFA-Cup match against Bohemians Prague (49). Braun also explores the unauthorized emigration of East German athletes to West Germany. The East German state punished those affiliated with emigres, for example, by staging a show trial against the coach of long jumper Manfred Steinbach, who emigrated to West Germany in 1958 (106), and harassing the family of gymnast Wolfgang Thüne, who emigrated in 1975, also giving him a twelve-year prison sentence in absentia for dereliction of military duty (109–110). Braun's close examination of German-German relations extends to her analysis of doping, which took place not only in the state-directed East German sports establishment but also in some West German athletic circles. Her analysis confirms that while doping took place in both Germanies, and even featured some forms of cooperation between West German and East German doctors (86), it developed a much more authoritarian character in East Germany. Both doctors and athletes experienced pressure to participate in order to maintain privileges and opportunities for themselves and their families (91, 94), and athletes who suspected that they were receiving steroids and wanted to do research had their library access blocked (98–99).
Key to Braun's book is her argument that sport constitutes a “special case” (11) in East German-West German relations because it was an area where East Germany had greater successes than West Germany. During the years of division, West Germany sought to adopt some East German practices, such as modeling the campaigns “Jugend trainiert für Olympia” on East Germany's Spartakiade competitions for children and youth (21). The decentralized nature of West German sport compared to East German sport imposed limits, however, and West Germany was unable to adopt the system of Kinder und Jugendsportschule as well as the nationwide weighing and measuring of children to determine the sport in which they were most likely to succeed (24–25), nor could West Germany replicate East Germany's 1969 decision to de-prioritize sports that were not multi-medal sports. (25). After German reunification, the West German sports establishment continued to seek knowledge about East German practices and methods, alongside the active recruitment of East German athletes (123).
Interwoven throughout Braun's analysis is an assessment of the state of existing historical scholarship on German sport. Braun begins the introduction as well as the book's final chapter with a discussion of the Nazi era, arguing that neither West Germany nor East Germany engaged significantly with the legacies of the Nazi era and the 1936 Olympic Games. Historical scholarship only properly emerged in the early 1990s when Berlin's bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games pushed the issue to the forefront. Although interesting, these Nazi-focused bookends to Braun's primary discussion of sports in divided Germany could be more seamlessly integrated into her book. More successful is her attention to how “Ostalgie” (nostalgia for the east), which manifests in part as pride in East Germany's athletic success, has shaped the perceptions of some that historical scholarship is overly biased against East Germany. Contrary to such impressions, Braun demonstrates that significant historical evidence fully justifies the description of East Germany's state-managed doping programs as “forced” (95). She also refutes claims that doping in West Germany has been neglected in historical scholarship (96). Engagement with the history of doping in West German was, in fact, bolstered by the “moral impetus” provided by research on East Germany after reunification (97).
Braun concludes her book celebrating that “the history of sports has found an established place in historical writing on the Federal Republic of Germany” (152). Her own contribution plays no small role in this development. Overall, Wettkampf der Systeme is concise, well written, and comprehensive, bringing together the insights of ample German-language secondary scholarship with Braun's own archival research to explore the German-German relationship in sport. Braun also provides valuable broader historical context on the history of the boycott and sanctions within the Olympic movement, the problematic drug testing practices, and the Soviet sports system. The book's combination of topical research and historiographical framing should be of interest to scholars of German sport, Cold War sports and culture, and postwar Germany more broadly.
