Escapes in GDR sport: motives, features and characteristics

More than three million people left the GDR between 1949 and 1989, many of them illegally and under dangerous circumstances. Sport, an explicit showcase sector of the SED state, was also significantly affected by the phenomenon of "Republikflucht". Hundreds of top athletes turned their backs on the GDR and sought their salvation in the ideologically ostracized West. The hopefuls of the socialist system thus became its "traitors" in the eyes of the GDR leadership. The lecture by Dr. René Wiese (Zentrum deutsche Sportgeschichte) will focus on biographical approaches from four decades of GDR sport that reveal the motives, escape routes and characteristics of athletes who fled.