Moldy Oranges in Karl-Marx-City: Berliner FC Dynamo, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Forgotten Past of East German Soccer

The Assistant Professor of Football: Soccer, Culture, History.

Between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, Dynamo Berlin, a club closely associated with the Communist East German Republic’s secret police, won the country’s title ten consecutive times. The hatred of the team across the country united its fans, but also provided the perhaps most prominent kind of complaint and grumbling that the GDR’s citizens had against the regime that ruled them. In 1989, that regime crumbled and fell. And so did Dynamo. Alan McDougall is a historian at the University of Guelph in Canada. He has written The People’s Game: Football, State and Society in East Germany, and takes us on the wild ride through a nation that is no more, with a club that polarizes Germany to this day.
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HELPFUL LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:
Music:
Video Collage of BFC’s glory years, with the song “Wann wird Dynamo wieder Meister?” (“When Will Dynamo be Champions Again?”) by 4xD

Andreas Auslauf - … Sein (“How it Should be”)

Feeling B - Ich Such die DDR (“I’m, searching for the GDR, and no one knows where she is”)

Namenlos - Nazis Wieder in Ostberlin ("Nazis Back in East Berlin")

Texts, Websites:

​​Alan McDougall, The People’s Game:Football, State and Society in East Germany
“What Happened to the Record East German Champions” (article from Matt Ford @matt_4d from Episode 1 for Deutsche Welle)

“Das randalierende Rätsel” (“The rioting enigma”), German TV Documentary from 1992 about BFC’s hools in the 1990s

“Dynamo Berlin: the soccer club “owned” by the Stasi” (2016 article from David Crossland via CNN)

Bonus, about the music: Arun Starkey, “Exploring the Importance of the East German Punk Scene” (2021)
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Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind
Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/