The People’s Game: Football, State, and Society in East Germany by Alan McDougall (review)

“Everyone is an expert about football,” popular parlance has it in Eastern Europe. Alan McDougall has produced an excellent monograph on a little known aspect of socialist sport, football (or soccer as it is known in much of the English-speaking world) in what was once called the GDR (or DDR), German Democratic Republic, a communist state that existed in 1949–90.

McDougall is not unknown in the discipline of East German history; he produced a milestone book in 2004 on the Free German Youth Movement (FDJ). This time, however, he offers a wonderful antidote to general theories about sport reflecting social issues. The People’s Game does make it clear that football of the East German variety was not simply a favorite pastime for diehard fans and club managers but relates to larger issues of politics, identity, and economy. Methodologically the book rests on a solid foundation: McDougall researched regional archives, utilized printed primary sources, and in order to obtain data about personal experiences he conducted interviews with fans. The book is organized thematically and chronologically, starting with the early GDR years of 1945–49 (chapter 2), and ending with the years of its demise between 1989 and 1991.

The focal aspect of McDougall’s study is organized into three parts. In Part I, the focus is on football as performance sport, as experienced by its central characters, the players, national teams, football clubs, and the role of the secret police, the Stasi. This latter point is especially fascinating as we learn how coaches, star players, and referees worked for the Stasi as informers. In Part II, McDougall switches to football as a spectator sport, tackling spectatorship in the Ulbricht era, the fan culture during the subsequent Honecker years, and the rise of hooliganism during the same period. We learn much about the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) and its stance on football as well as spectators. Here, chapter 9 is especially revealing of the ways in which the East German state failed to curb football unrest, a failure that paralleled similar global hooliganism. The subsequent chapter presents an even more interesting picture about football and corruption in the GDR. More than any other chapters, chapters 9 and 10 offer the most valuable data about the connection of politics and public sentiments about football and the rejection of the Honecker regime. Part III concentrates on football as a mass participatory activity as we learn a great deal about everyday life experiences of players and fans alike. Chapters detail topics such as women’s football, matches between East and West German amateur teams, and the nature of mass sport and the failing facilities and infrastructural problems. McDougall is correct in emphasizing that football in East Germany was unique in the Eastern bloc, as it “tended to be more subversive than state-affirming” by “keeping alive expressions of Heimat, Resistenz, and individualism that stubbornly resisted the SED’s dictatorial goals” (336).

As a final note: it is safe to say, as McDougall duly asserts in his concluding chapter, that football clubs from the former East Germany will exist outside the German premier league system and will remain second-class for many years to come. The two most successful ones, Dynamo Dresden and F. C. Hansa Rostock, have been relegated to the second and third divisions in the Bundesliga. Despite this status, Germans, both East and West, enjoy their game: after the English football league championship, the 2. Bundesliga is the second-most-watched secondary football league in the world. I congratulate McDougall for providing a succinct and heretofore unknown English-language analysis about the history of this fascinating world. His book can be highly recommended both to specialists of East Germany and its policies toward sport and to those concerned with politics and sport in general. Graduate students will, no doubt, find many challenging and exciting questions in McDougall’s book to utilize in their...