Leipzig, 1993 Of Sport, State, and Stasi: Socialism with an Un-Beautiful Face

Back again in the so-called Heldenstadt (city of heroes), as the faded bumper stickers on a few cars remind me. Is the word now tinged with irony? Though the city is in the middle of a construction boom, Leipzigers are the first to tell you that the city’s heroic image has been badly tarnished in the last few years. A warm mid-September afternoon in the smoggy city center. I take a seat in one of the cafes that dot the streets near the University. Students sit inside with books in their laps, talking animatedly to one another. Across the street is the Leipzig railway station—before the war, it was the biggest in Europe—and the Gewandhaus, where the Leipzig orchestra plays. Kurt Masur, who helped negotiate with police to hold their fire against Leipzig protesters before the city’s first mass demonstration— four years ago come October 9—is still conducting at the Gewandhaus. Otherwise, everything seems to have changed—the Leipzig smog excepted. Ute, a 23-year-old, first-year Germanistik student at the University, enters and greets me. Once an accomplished teenage ice skater in a top Sportschule—indeed, at 16, a young Privilegierte (privileged one) on her way to joining the elite traveling Sportkader—Ute is still slim and athletic. She has come to tell me about her expulsion almost a decade ago from the elect Red circle, the causes of which, she told me on the phone, “I have lately been brooding about incessantly.” She did not elaborate. I know only that the saga of her youthful rebellion against the State and her struggle to leave the DDR in 1988/89 had begun soon thereafter. Reared in Weissenfels, a town near Leipzig, Ute was born into a family of athletes. In the 1950s, her father competed on the DDR national ice hockey team and her mother was a top handball player and member of the DDR national championship squad; Ute’s older brother, Dieter, reached the Thuringia championship soccer team.