BFC Dynamo – “Stasi FC”: With your back to the game

State -prescribed doping in competitive sports of the GDR is an old topic, and there have been many publications and films since the end of this state. The documentary “Stasi FC” is now negotiating a chapter that has so far been less respected: GDR top football and its systematic processing by the Ministry of State Security. His unloved top club was the BFC Dynamo. He began his ten-year triumphal march in 1979 in the Oberliga, the highest GDR division and became the most hated club in the country after the third championship in a row.

Because the head of the MfS, Erich Mielke, was a fan of the BFC, the Association of State Security, the People’s Police and the German customs gave the nickname “Mielke-Club” from the vernacular. As is well known, Erich Mielke was a convinced communist and ruthless Tschekist who had built one of the most successful intelligence parade in the world. And you should also notice that in terms of sport.

At the beginning of the 1970s, the most successful team in the GDR capital, the Army Sport Club (ASK) Vorwärts Berlin, was uprooted quickly and delegated to Frankfurt (Oder). From then on, the BFC Hecht was in the carp pond and made plenty of prey. A promising talents from smaller clubs were not courted in the GDR, but delegated. This documentary tells of this. “If there was a player that Mielke wanted, the boy was told:” After the summer you will play for the BFC, and if you don’t do it, that is the end of competition sports for you, “says Falko Götz, one of the portrayed contemporary witnesses, who played for Dynamo from 1971 until he moved from Belgrade to the west in 1983 and then ran for Leverkusen and Cologne.

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Several GDR referees were said to reliably sound their whistles in favor of the BFC. There is no written instruction, but this thesis is supported by numerous strange referee decisions in favor of the BFC. Especially since there were a number of referees unofficial employees of the Stasi, for example Bernd Stumpf, who had five minutes in 1986 at the (the championship decisive) between Lok Leipzig and the BFC Dynamo until he was able to give the Mielke club a penalty in the 95th minute. That made the BFC team like that “nobody wanted to win like this,” says Falko Götz in the film. The fans of the BFC didn’t care, they took the referee decisions with cheeky humor and sang: »Who should be our guide? Erich Mielke! “

From a purely sporting point of view, the BFC did not even have such strange referee decisions. “The BFC Dynamo undoubtedly had a top team over the years,” says Ralf Minge, a former top striker of Dynamo Dresden, who was a worthy rival to the BFC for many years in the race for the championship.

On the European scale, the BFC was not a top team and flew out in the first round in the European Cup. Falko Götz: »We won national titles, but internationally we were an absolute disaster. For me there was only West German football, where as a player you were responsible for your own achievements. «

So some BFC players went to the west: Falko Götz, Dirk Schlegel, Lutz Eigendorf. The latter was Mielke’s favorite player. When he fled to the FRG in 1979, Mielke raged before Stasi officers and is said to have asked for the traitor’s death. In 1981 Eigendorf died in a car accident, a participation of the Stasi could never be proven, but for Götz there is “no question that the Stasi was able to do so”.

In 1981 was also the year in which the Stasi, thanks to the Willfähriger Spitzel, prevented three Dresden players from fleeing to the west. One of them was Gerd Weber, who lamented his fate in “Stasi FC”. Unfortunately, he forgets to mention that he had spied on his teammates for four years before the failed escape for four years as an unofficial employee “Wiehland” of the MfS.

The BFC won its tenth championship title in 1988. After that it went down with the club, to which you still hold your past as a Stasi club, in contrast to Dynamo Dresden, where the Ministry of the Interior was also in charge by autumn 1989.

With conventional dramaturgy, great archive recordings, atmospheric camera rides and talking heads alternate in the film, with former footballers in particular having their say. This is cut quickly and ensures a cool drive. A contrast to the embarrassing half-cooking stiffness of the BFC players in the presence of officials.

The role of the fans that occurred in the case of the BFC are much too short, which occurred ironically in the case of the BFC, but here except for a few sentences such as »We have been partly with our back to the game, fell victim to the cutting table.

“Stasi FC” succeeds in conveying ruthlessness and arbitrariness of the GDR monitoring system, whereby this is reduced a little too much to the person Erich Mielke; The footballers and officials only appear as victims, the active participation of athletes and trainers is left out. The appearances of the former unofficial employees Gerd Weber and Bernd Stange are questionable, formerly the GDR national coach because their pointed activity is not addressed.

The small-sized statements of a full-time Stasi officer also contribute little to illuminate. Here, a chance was given away to ask him about the methods of monitoring and repression of footballers and fans. And a voice from the off -road missed the gate when she says that Mielke was president of the BFC Dynamo. There was no president, just one club chairman, and that was called Manfred Kirsten.

Predicate: Worth seeing.

“Stasi FC”, Germany 2023. Director: Daniel Gordon, Arne Birkenstock, Zakaria Rahmani. 91 minutes already started.