Sport across Cold War borders in the 1970s and 1980s: East and West German football fans and players under surveillance

Given the cultural centrality of sport during the Cold War, the East German communist authorities constructed an elaborate system of surveillance to prevent flight to the West by sport personalities and to control private interactions between East and West Germans, encounters that increased exponentially in the détente era. East German football fans met up with West German counterparts to watch games in East Berlin as well as at high-profile matches in Eastern Europe that involved clubs such as Bayern Munich and the West German national team. Cross-border interconnections were especially close between supporters of Hertha Berlin in the West and those of Union Berlin in the East whose bitter rivalry with the Stasi-supported BFC Dynamo frequently erupted in violence. Widespread outbursts of ‘hooliganism’ and East-West football entanglements testified not only to the fracturing of Cold War polarities but also to the prevalence of autonomous activities in society that contributed to the cultural ‘defeat’ of GDR- -style socialism.