Divided Germans Stand, United They Might Fall : Unification: Collapse of East’s sports structure, lingering bad feelings between former rivals undercut Olympic efforts.

Shortly after the Berlin Wall collapsed in late 1989, Klaus Schoenberger had a dream. Schoenberger, an East German 400-meter hurdler in the 1970s and now director of the Berliner Turn-und Sportclub in the eastern part of the capital, envisioned a powerful all-German Olympic team.

“I thought, if you took the East German development system and combined it with West German management techniques and the newest Western equipment, the result would produce a rocket that nobody could hold,” he said.

His dream was not to be. The reason is simple: German unification hasn’t turned out the way Schoenberger or many others thought it would.

The molding of East and West German athletes into a joint Olympic team has been a tough, sometimes bitter, often disillusioning affair filled with trauma and misunderstanding on both sides. Almost everywhere, reality has fallen short of expectation, and in combining two of the world’s sports machines, the reality is that one plus one equals something less than two.

That is not to say the first all-German Olympic team since 1964 won’t be good. Germany is expected to finish among the top medal-winning nations.

“We’ve assembled not only the biggest, but by far and away the most talented team in our Olympic history,” said Ulrich Feldhoff, who, as chairman of Germany’s National Committee for Competitive Sports, will lead the German team at Barcelona.

Feldhoff predicted that Germany probably would end up behind the United States in a battle for second place in the overall medals’ chase, which he expects to be led by the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The German mass circulation daily Bild Zeitung recently quoted from what it described as a secret assessment of CIS functionaries that predicted Germany would finish third, with 114 medals, including 37 golds.

But, for many, whatever success the Germans achieve in Barcelona pales when compared to the dream of what might have been. After all, the Germans’ combined medal total in Seoul was 142 (East Germany 102, West Germany, 40).

In part, Germany’s Olympic problems stem from the way unity has occurred--effectively a western takeover, in which virtually anything East German was quickly dismissed as second-rate amid the heady western self-congratulations of the moment.

West Germany’s obvious material success and the triumph of free-market democracy in the Cold War left western Germans with a thinly concealed superiority complex toward those from the east. By contrast, easterners have resented being treated as inferiors and blamed for the failures of the system in which they grew up. In the purely non-political sense, they also mourn a loss of their national identity.

In sports, unity has an added dimension because it was a rare area in which East Germans had repeatedly outshone their more numerous, richer cousins.

The result has left the Germans far from united.

There are other problems, too, such as demise of the all-embracing East German sports development system and the distraction of persistent doping scandals.

All have combined to blunt the German assault in Barcelona.

Among the potential medal-winners who have already been eliminated--all amid accusations of doping--are: track and field stars Katrin Krabbe, Grit Breuer and Silke Moeller--all of whom left the team; Astrid Strauss, the 800-meter freestyle swimmer and silver medalist in Seoul, who has been banned for six months; and Detlef Hoffmann, the world champion canoeist, who was passed over by the selection committee.

While these scandals have seriously disrupted the team’s preparations and distracted its concentration, the biggest problem remains integration. The country’s premier sports monthly, “Sports,” plans to preview the German Olympic team later this month under the headline: “Divided Under One Flag.”

Success in bridging this division varies from sport to sport.

In some areas, such as rowing, sailing and boxing, efforts to build common teams are said to have gone well.

In others, such as western-dominated tennis, it is hardly an issue.

But in track and field, both east and western sources said initial goodwill in building a common team has been badly undercut by the Krabbe situation.

Thomas Springstein, Krabbe’s coach, indicated that one reason for withdrawing his sprinters was to spare them from further stress of verbal attacks, which have come loudest from western competitors, including middle-distance runner Gabi Lesch and Dieter Baumann, the 5,000-meter silver medalist in Seoul.

“I’m convinced there will be real problems in the German team,” Schoenberger said. “They’ll divide between those who believe she was guilty and those who are convinced she’s the victim of a witch hunt.”

Krabbe reportedly is considering suing the German Light Athletic Assn. for several million dollars in damages.

“It’s a big issue,” added Horst Blattergerste, director of the association. “If the only questions you get from the press day after day are about doping, it’s bound to disturb your concentration.”

That all five athletes are from the east, and the institutions involved in the accusations are western-led, has only aggravated tensions within the team. For many westerners, these affairs only confirm suspicions that eastern excellence was fueled by drugs, while easterners claim the system has tried to destroy those among them who excel.

Nowhere is the atmosphere worse than in swimming, where eastern and western association officials are said to have fought from the first minute.

The especially messy way in which Strauss, 23, was dismissed from the team seems to reflect the larger mood. After it was found that she had unusually high testosterone levels in her system during a test in March, Strauss was banned by the German Swimming Assn. But the ban was made public only last month to a stadium crowd in Munich as Strauss was racing in the Olympic trials. She emerged from the water to be stunned by an army of reporters and television cameras awaiting her reaction.

“I have the impression that what’s going on in this association no longer has anything to do with human beings, but with animals,” said Bernd Henneberg, the swimmer’s enraged coach.

The Berliner Morgenpost, a western Berlin newspaper, summed up the situation: “The gauntlet of Munich was an undignified spectacle and can only make more noticeable the divide between East and West.”

Eastern athletes also have undergone dramatic changes in their personal lives. For the first time, they must deal with simple things, such as making travel arrangements, finding jobs or getting sponsors to generate income. Because East German athletes were a privileged elite, their fall was both further and harder than most in a region that today suffers about 30% unemployment and serious social dislocation.

“For the athletes, it was a total collapse,” Schoenberger said. “One day they had everything, the next day, nothing.”

Unlike western athletes, who tend to marry late because they can’t afford a family, many eastern stars in their mid-20s found themselves with families that suddenly had to be supported.

“There’s more pressure on Ossies (easterners) than Wessies (westerners) in these Olympics,” said Reinhard Franke, a sports psychologist working with Olympians in Berlin. “Their world has changed. They’ve got to adjust to the realities of a new one.”

Because of this turmoil, few expect dazzling performances from the easterners. “Their performance hasn’t dropped tremendously, but it certainly hasn’t grown either,” Franke said.

The speed with which the eastern sports development system collapsed is hard for some to grasp. At its peak three years ago, for example, the Berliner Turn-und Sportclub was a pillar of the East German “Sportwunder”--an efficient factory that produced world-class athletes. In the lobby of the main sports hall, an entire wall is devoted to listing the results of the club’s 29-year history: four Olympic, 24 world and 37 European champions.

There is room for more names, but as anyone connected with German sports knows, the glory days--when a nation with a population roughly half that of California’s gathered 102 medals at one Olympiad--are over.

The $350 million per year that East Germany poured exclusively into developing world-class athletes has been cut drastically. Today, the region that was East Germany is preparing for the 1992 Olympic Games on a two-year, $27-million budget.

Gone are the vast majority of the 6,000 coaches and 12,000 doctors, scientists and functionaries who underpinned the system.

“Never again will sports have such good conditions as existed for the East Germans,” Blattergerste said. “They had 600 full-time coaches (in track and field), we had 16. We’ve taken on about 30 (East German coaches) and will try to place 20 others, but that’s about it.”

The methodical, nationwide sifting for talent in East Germany that began in village kindergartens and ended in places such as the Berliner Turn-und Sportclub, is also gone. In its place is a more low-key process.

“No democratic state is prepared to underwrite sports the way that East Germany did,” said Franke, the sports psychologist.

Only the initial effects of the demise of the East German selection process will be felt in Barcelona; the best the east has to offer for Spain had already been spotted before the Berlin Wall fell. But with a sharply reduced system of youth talent scouting, the east’s contribution to future German teams is expected to decline dramatically.

“You can say it really ended on Jan. 1, 1990,” said Schoenberger, charting the decline of his club as a producer of world-class athletes.

It was then that the money began to dry up and the club’s coaches, physiotherapists, doctors, teachers and other support staff began to go.

When Schoenberger took over the club in September of 1989, two months before the Wall fell, he had 125 specialists devoted solely to training the club’s athletes and a total of 230 permanent employees. Today there are two: Schoenberger and his secretary. His budget, once an annual $4 million present from the state, is now $1 million gathered by hard-won sponsorships, grants and membership fees.

In 1988, the club placed 11 athletes on the East German team. For Barcelona, it will be sending three.

Squinting into the bright midday summer sun, Schoenberger recently stood on the entrance steps of the main sports hall and described to a visitor the decline of his empire--an empire than remains a kind of sports university, but a much diminished one.

Off to the left was a high-rise apartment building a few hundred yards beyond the practice fields; it once served as the main dormitory for the nation’s best young athletes. Today it is an international youth hostel, still linked to the club. But there is only room for those who can afford to pay the high fees. As a result, says Schoenberger, it is half empty.

To the right, there was a building with offices for coaches and trainers; it is largely unoccupied. The nearby kindergarten and youth school--where promising figure skaters and other talent as young as 6 and 7 years old once squeezed a few hours of school between training sessions--is still a school. But it is filled with children interested in sports, rather than prospective world champions. And now, academics takes precedent over sports.

“Before everything changed, I would call (the school) and tell them when I wanted the children for training,” Schoenberger said. “Today, they tell me when I can have them.”