History

When the Berlin Wall fell 35 years ago, the Cold War came to an end. Chris Dodd witnessed East Germany’s collapse and chronicled the crumbling of the DDR’s rowing mastery

Words: Chris Dodd

The Berlin Wall Game

It’s 35 years since the sudden collapse of what was fondly known as the Deutsche Democratise Republic signalled the end of the Cold War, crippled the Warsaw Pact of Eastern Bloc countries under the influence of the Soviet Union, and destroyed the federal entities of Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the USSR itself.

I was reminded of this by Göran Buckhorn, the editor of an anthology of rowing writing due for publication in October (The Greatest Rowing Stories Ever Told, Lyons Press). He has seen in his wisdom to include my account of the fall of the greatest rowing nation the world had ever seen.

In the autumn of 1989, I was writing The Story of World Rowing (Stanley Paul, 1992), and found myself in the right place at the right time to witness the end of an era. In November of that year, I interrupted a tour through the rowing gems of Mexico City, Havana, Buenos Aeries and Rio to attend the World Rowing [then known as FISA] coaches conference in Indianapolis.

Such conferences are excellent occasions to gather material because the venerable attendees are not attending to their crews, thus lowering their guard when it comes to sharing information. And so, on the evening of 9 November we were enjoying a USRowing reception at the Columbia Club, a pleasure palace drawing much of its membership from the corn growers of Indiana whose sporting entertainment is usually hollering for the Hoosiers baseball team or going deaf at the annual Indianapolis 500.

The party was in full swing when a liveried flunky wheeled a large TV set into the marbled hall and suggested to the company in general that we may be interested in what was showing on the screen. He tuned in to a jaw-dropping scene of men and women with picks and shovels on top of the hated Berlin Wall, intent on destroying it.

Since its erection in 1961 the Wall had been a symbol of the division of Germany after defeat in the 1939-1945 war and had divided the city’s east zone (the Democratic Republic, controlled by the Soviet Union) from the west zone (American, British and French sectors in Berlin, constituent parts of the Federal Republic). It was equipped with watchtowers to catch Easties escaping to West Berlin and prevent residents on the east side moving to the west.

Wilfried Hofmann, president of the East German rowing federation and director of Dynamo Berlin, the police sports club, was wedged in an armchair in pole position before the box. I watched his jaw drop to an unprecedented depth as his ginger complexion turned white. By breakfast time on the next day, Hofmann had vanished, faster than the Ost Deutsche that he had served diligently for most of his life. All of us in the Columbia Club in Indianapolis on 9 November 1989 learned that the world would never be the same again. Zing was in the air.