East Germany’s Ewald, Father of Miracles, Has Few Regrets

“Would you like to take a walk,” Manfred Ewald asked as he finished his morning coffee. “I’ll show you where it all began.”

He left the lobby of the Grand Hotel near the Friedrichstrasse train station, walked a block through a business district that, for East Berlin, is thriving and turned right on Neustadtische Kirchstrasse.

“This area was all burned out after the war, everything damaged except for that building,” he said, pointing toward a large complex that now, four decades later, is occupied by the U.S. Embassy.

The only other building on the block left standing among the rubble created by the bombing of Berlin was uninhabitable except for the first two of its four floors.

Ewald pointed to a window with the curtains half-drawn on the second floor. That was the office of the sports federation for the newly formed country of East Germany.

Ewald’s first job after arriving in East Berlin in October of 1948, was in that office. He was 21, recently out of college and already the federation’s vice president. That was not as impressive as it sounds because there was only one other full-time staff member, the president, Waldemar Borde.

The small office they shared had two tables and one chair. Borde took the chair. When Ewald needed to read something important, he went to the toilet, put down the lid and sat there until he finished.

In 1952, Ewald was appointed East Germany’s secretary of state for physical culture and sports. During the next 36 years, he became known throughout the world as the man behind the controls of the so-called Miracle Machine, a sports system that enabled a country of 16 million to compete on the same level with the United States and the Soviet Union.

But no aspect of East German life under the former Communist government has escaped scrutiny as the country embraces democracy and, eventually, reunification with West Germany.

And so Ewald, who retired last year in poor health at 62 from his positions as chairman of the East German Gymnastics and Sports Federation (DTSB) and president of the National Olympic Committee, receives as much criticism for his accomplishments as credit.

DTSB Secretary Werner Neumann said last week that the federation under Ewald abused its power, veiled itself in secrecy, put too much emphasis on elite sports at the expense of mass-participation recreation and, in conjunction with the government, used Olympic medals as propaganda tools to divert attention from the country’s limited advancement in other areas.

“History will hand down its sentence,” Ewald said. “It will not come in one day or one year. It will come in 10 or 20 or 50 years.”

In his first newspaper interview in more than two years, Ewald admitted mistakes. For example, much of the secrecy, which created an aura of mystique around East German sports, was unnecessary, he said.

He seemed eager, however, not only to defend but to explain the sports system and his role in it.

There were inconsistencies and contradictions in his comments, but one could hardly expect him to be objective about the child he raised.

He said that the federation distanced itself from the Nazi sports system, which promoted Fascist ideology. At the same time, he protested when it was suggested that the DTSB was equally guilty of espousing the Communist doctrine, although it had an ideology department.

Ewald said he is proud of East German sports and that people still stop him on the streets to tell him the same thing. In order to predict the verdict of future historians, he said, one first must understand history.

As the country was rebuilt after the war, he said the federation’s first priority when it was formed in 1948 was to organize mass-participation sports.

Three years later, however, the East German federation was encouraged by its government, as well as its allies in the Soviet Union, to develop high-performance sports. It is not a coincidence, he said, that 1951 also was the year that the Soviets joined the Olympic movement.

But when the East Germans tried to follow, they met resistance. He said the International Olympic Committee and some international sports federations favored the West Germans, giving them almost instant recognition, although neither country was allowed to compete independently in the Olympics in 1956, 1960 or 1964. Their athletes had to compete against each other for places on an artificially united team.

“We were nobody,” Ewald said. “Rowing was not bad in our country at that point. But when we lost against the West Germans, even if it was by 20 centimeters, that meant we couldn’t compete at an international championship. That brought about very high motivation for our athletes.”

And for the DTSB.

“We needed high performances to demonstrate the existence of our sports system,” he said.

While East Germany was struggling for international recognition in sports, the same was true in other areas. Ewald said that began to change when East Germany emerged in 1972 as a sports power, finishing second in the Winter Olympics at Sapporo, Japan, and third in the Summer Olympics at Munich in total medals.

“After our efforts, it was easier for diplomats to go to other countries as representatives of the state,” he said. “Therefore, it is right to say that sports of this country had some influence on East Germany’s recognition internationally as a country. As a result, we found a good ear for our requests from the government as well as our demands.”

The government’s interest, however, was not entirely positive, he said, because some officials, such as former Communist leader Erich Honecker, used sports for their own political purposes. But he denied that the DTSB was a propaganda arm of the government.

He also rejected criticism that the government spent excessively on Olympic athletes while ignoring mass-participation sports.

Producing a copy of the DTSB’s 1989 budget from his briefcase, he said the total amount spent on sports by the government was $534 million. Of that, he said, 39.4% went to elite sports and the rest to recreational sports.

“I think the minister of finance will tell you that East German sports was the part of society that was most careful and most effective with its money,” he said.

He also defended the DTSB against complaints that most of the money allocated for high-performance sports was spent on a few that were most likely to produce medals.

“No country in the world is in the position to develop all disciplines on the same level,” he said. “We gave more support to track and field than to billiards. We supported swimming more than bowling.

“As a result, we achieved very high productivity in a country that does not have unlimited resources. Up to now, only 50% of our regions have indoor swimming pools. It is right to criticize this. But it is not right to say that if we didn’t give all this money to high-performance sports that we would have indoor swimming pools in all districts.

“The amount of money we spent on high-performance sports was so small that we couldn’t have built every region an indoor swimming pool with that money. Our mistake was that we did not discuss these figures publicly 10 years ago.”

Asked to explain the DTSB’s success with a limited budget, Ewald pointed to a highly organized system that identified talent at a young age and developed it at sports schools in each of 15 regions.

“In the past, there was an opinion that high-performance sports should have their roots in mass sports,” he said. “We came to the conclusion that high-performance sports have to be developed from a very young age.”

As a result, children left their families to live and train at the schools, returning home only on weekends.

“We brought the children to the schools with their parents’ approval,” Ewald said. “Besides sports, our aim was to give them a high level of education. You can’t win Olympic medals with idiots.

“I have gotten no letters from parents complaining because the development of their children was done in this way.”

The children learned the latest in training methods, technique and strategy from coaches who studied at the famous sports college in Leipzig.

Connected to the college is a sports research center, where Neumann acknowledged that scientists experimented with performance-enhancing drugs. He said, however, that the results were not applied for practical use by athletes.

Ewald, however, denied that the research was conducted.

He said there was drug use by East German athletes, but that it neither was encouraged nor condoned by the DTSB.

“We had positive cases, most of them from the age groups of 18, 19 and 20,” he said. “When they were caught, we disciplined the athlete, the coach and the physician.”

Depending on the amount of money provided by the new government, Neumann said the sports schools will remain active but with increased enrollment in more varied sports and fewer teachers. The college in Leipzig, he said, will become independent of the DTSB. Asked if he was saddened to see the Miracle Machine dismantled, Ewald said some changes were overdue.

“The changes in sports are a result of the political changes in the country, which were absolutely necessary,” he said. “As far as I was in a position from my political functions to support the changes, I did it.”

But he said the DTSB’s new leaders in some cases have spoken and acted before thinking.

“I hope my friends who are now responsible look a little bit to what we did in the past,” he said. “I think they will come to the right conclusions.”

Is he bitter?

“Personally, no,” he said. “I do not accept that history is complete.”