Outsider, leader – between the heroes

How was it again with Bayern Munich from East Berlin, the GDR series champion of the 80s, the internationally completely unsuccessful favorite club by Erich Mielke? The BFC Dynamo is currently back in the cinema, as “Stasi FC”, everyone will find it somehow interesting. Also the “young world”, which was always critical of the GDR criticism, said: “Angry worth seeing”. Today the BFC is number three in Berlin, in the fourth division; Tennis Borussia, number four, plays in the fifth. Sometimes, very rarely, you can see one of these post boxes on the roadside in East Berlin, which alternately brushed blue-white (Hertha) or red-white (Union) at night, surprisingly appear in Weinrot-Weiß (BFC). So the BFC lives on somehow-like everyone who still watches football, although everything actually speaks against it (club World Cup, Saudi Arabia, FIFA and the dangers of alcoholism).

The writer and BFC fan ancestors (from the left wing, which is really exists contrary to the club’s political image) wrote a great BFC novel. He has already done a lot of fun and intelligent things (for example on the radio the ingenious “dialogue with God”), but this is a top performance that is worthy of a former leader. She is named after an almost forgotten player, »Reinhard Lauck. One of us, and the “icons” series published by Frank Willmann at Voland & Quist. In it, authors combine personal experiences and invented stories with a football figure that forms them.

With Lauck, who was against the FRG in 1974 in the only game and victory of the GDR and also in 1976 at the Olympic victory, it was legendary down after the career end of the 80s. He finally becomes carbon tractor and dies as an alcoholic at the age of 51. In his active time, he was always in the middle of the field: “It also needed those who stood between the heroes, supplied them with passes, formed the scaffolding. Lauck was one of that. Without him everything would have collapsed. The BFC, it would only have been a pile of rubble. Clear the sun! “

Lauck is pure projection figure in this novel. Because it is actually an extremely charming youth book and even a novel and not a novel. All the better, you can read much faster!

Action: In Berlin-Schöneweide, two opposing teenagers carry one brave, the other anxious, with the thought of fleeing to West Berlin through the sewage system. But what they reject again because they could no longer see the games of the BFC Dynamo with Reinhard Lauck. And then they would be traitor to the club, just like Lauck was one who won the FDGB Cup with Union and then went to the local rival. Yes, almost anything was possible in the GDR, even if the opposite is claimed today. And the BFC was “the best team in the universe”.

Anhne: Reinhard Lauck. One of us. Voland & Quist, 94 p., Br., 12 €.