Army Film and the Avant-Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military

Abstract

encapsulated within the borders of the GDR, but communicating with the rest of Europe and more importantly with West Germany. Methodologically, the book is grounded in a well-balanced variety of local and central archival sources, with the addition of newspaper sources and interviews. The author divides the book into three large parts, focusing on ‘Player’, ‘Fans’, and ‘The People’s Game’, and thus offering three different, but complementary, views on the interrelationship of football and society. The focus of the first section is on professional players and the so-called ‘Leistungsfußball’ (performance football). The ‘from above’ perspective engages, amongst others, with the above-average privileges of footballers and the negation of their lifestyle(s) in a socialist society. These privileges were, however, often accompanied by state surveillance, leading the book to examine the phenomenon of ‘Republiksflucht’, the escape from the GDR, amongst top footballers and why it nonetheless remained a relatively marginal phenomenon. A particular interest is devoted to the national team and its struggles to foster an East German national identity, as well as to professional club football localisms, which undermined the ideological credo of a unified GDR national culture. The second section offers a juxtaposed ‘from below’ perspective, illustrating what it was like to be a football fan in the GBR, with special attention dedicated to the country’s issue with football hooliganism in the 1970s and 1980s. McDougall demonstrates how the lack of political grip on the game provided a relatively low risk opportunity to express opposition to the state and to reassert, at times radical, ‘Eigen-Sinn’. The third segment deepens the ‘from below’ perspective by examining the role of football in everyday GDR life. Touching upon widely neglected topics such as women’s football, amateur footballing encounters across the East–West divide or state-deficiencies in providing material needs for grassroots football, McDougall shows how these were spaces ‘outside the spotlight’ with significant autonomy from the state. Concluding, the red thread throughout The People’s Game is that football in the GDR (and same is to be said about other totalitarian contexts) can neither be described as a subversive tool in the hands of people opposing the socialist system, nor a political instrument for power holders to propagate their ideological agenda. As shown by McDougall, particularly in its early days, institutional football was far from a central interest for the state, which left organizations rarely staffed with ideologically trained people who were also suitable for the requirements of the job. As a result, grassroots initiatives on a local level as well as local power holders were the driving force of GDR football. That does not mean that the state did not exercise its power. McDougall, however, argues that top-down decision-making, such as club relocations, re-naming, player transfers, favouritisms, and manipulations often only illustrated the limitations of controlling football. The frustration within the state’s power elite over the incapability to control football for their purposes or to stop its constant rise in popularity ultimately mirrored the dysfunctionality of socialist state structures on all societal levels. The book’s strengths are certainly its three levels of research that help to carve out the official and unofficial experiences of football as a contested space. Ultimately, The People’s Game represents an excellent example of research using football to illustrate the colourful ambiguities of everyday life in the GDR.