Jorg Berger had not been allowed to accompany the GDR Under-21s team he was coaching to
a game in the West since December 1976.
That month, the authorities had found out he was about to divorce his wife, Harriet.
Single men were considered a flight risk. Berger was told to move back into the Leipzig
apartment he had shared with Harriet and their young son Ron if he wanted his travel privileges
reinstated, but he refused.
The former Lokomotive Leipzig player also rejected an offer to become one of the 174,000
informal collaborators the Stasi ran until the fall of the regime in 1990.
In March 1979, Berger was at last permitted to go with the junior national team to a match
in Subotica, Yugoslavia. But the Stasi were still nervous about him defecting. They broke
into his apartment to search for clues he might be planning his escape. He later read
in his file they had made a drawing of the regular route he drove to see one of his girlfriends
near Berlin.
The situation became especially fraught when BFC Dynamo player Lutz Eigendorf, one of the
most highly-rated East German footballers, defected to the West five days before Berger’s
under-23s were boarding their plane.
The Stasi were under huge pressure to prevent any more famous athletes fleeing.
He decided he had to take the chance regardless. Like thousands of fellow citizens who attempted
to escape the economic hardship and political repression in the GDR each year, Berger had
long dreamt of a better life over the Wall. He needed to be free.
In Subotica, Berger left the team’s hotel at 5am, took a train to Belgrade and sought
help from the West German embassy, who issued him with a fake passport. A huge manhunt was
underway. All newspapers carried the story. Berger was even recognised by a border policeman
just before crossing into Austria, but he was let go and arrived in Munich a few hours
later.
“My father had committed a crime against the state and was now considered a traitor,”
His son, Ron Berger, says, sitting in a cafe in Frankfurt 40 years later. “But I didn’t
have much of an idea what all of that actually meant as a nine-year-old boy. Was he out of
my life for ever? Family members of GDR deserters were also discriminated against in their work
life or in school. And those who knew about the flight in advance could go to prison.”
Well aware of those dangers, Jorg had been careful not to incriminate Harriet or Ron
“My mum didn’t know”, Ron say, “but she felt something was going on, especially
when he visited us for the last time before heading off to Yugoslavia.
Harriet was brought in for lengthy questioning. The Stasi alleged she had been tipped off
about Jorg’s intention to defect to the “non-socialist economic area”, as the
GDR referred to West Germany, but ended up believing her account.
Ron doesn’t remember anyone treating him differently at school at first but in the
following weeks, strangers would come up to him and ask whether he was in contact with
his father in the West. He was, but only intermittently. Jorg only phoned every three months or so.
The calls had to be pre-registered two hours in advance.
“I sat by the receiver, waiting for the phone to ring, a bag of nerves. My father
wasn’t able to explain himself to me and I didn’t feel free to talk either. There
was a crackling in the line. You knew the Stasi were listening in. We couldn’t relate
to each other as father and son anymore.”
Following Jorg’s defection, the state auctioned off his belongings to raise funds for the
monthly alimony of 120 Ostmark, worth about 20 West German marks on the black market at
the time. Via friends or family, Jorg would secretly send his son gifts — a set of coloured
markers, bars of chocolate, a pair of trainers — but Ron could never show those to outsiders.
Jorg was hired as coach of Bundesliga 2 club SV Darmstadt 98 in May 1979. During his next
jobt, at SSV Ulm 1846, he proved himself an effective firefighter avoiding relegation
to the third division.
He eventually came to be seen as an expert in lost causes. Bundesliga sides Eintracht
Frankfurt, 1. FC Koln and Schalke 04 all escaped the drop under his energetic guidance. “Jorg
Berger is such a good coach, he would have saved the Titanic, too,” Norwegian striker
Jan-Aage Fjortoft said after he helped Frankfurt stay up for a second time in 1999.
Throughout the 1980s, the Stasi continued to regard him as an enemy of the state. GDP
agents followed his every step in West Germany. Once, two men approached him in the street
late at night and warned of dire consequences for his parents, who still lived in Leipzig,
if he didn’t agree to meet his mother in Sweden.
Why Sweden? He sensed they were planning to kidnap him. After the fall of Communism, his
Stasi file revealed there had indeed been at least two attempts to get him back to the
East. Once, a wheel came loose as he was driving at high speed, another time, his tyres were
slashed. For a while, he slept with a gun underneath his pillow.
Berger became very ill in 1986. He was unable to walk or pick up things. Doctors diagnosed
polyneuropathy, a disease affecting the peripheral nerves. He recovered after a few months. A
university professor who looked at his case later on suspected he had been poisoned by
lead or arsenic.
There were attacks on his reputation, too. His file showed that the Stasi had a journalist
working for Kicker magazine spread a rumour that Berger was homosexual, which was taboo
at the time.
Ron Berger kept pace with his father’s career watching the “class enemy” TV stations
of West Germany. Almost everyone did, flouting the law. In his flat, the terrestrial aerial
was positioned near the door so it could be quickly hidden when unknown visitors arrived.
“Growing up in the GDR, it was normal to support two clubs,” says Ron. “You had
your hometown club — Lok(omotiv) Leipzig, in my case — and a Bundesliga side. Most
were fans of Bayern Munich or Hamburger SV at the time but I chose Eintracht Frankfurt.”
At GDR top-division games, kids and teenagers would meet outside the ground and trade Western
fan memorabilia — scarves, stickers, badges, posters, magazines — that had been smuggled
in on the black market.
He and Harriet lived in a socialist mega-block of apartments, containing 85 units on each
of the 10 stories. Fast and agile, Ron played for the youth teams of Lok Leipzig, the same
side his father had represented in the late 1960s. He was widely seen as the biggest talent
of his age group in the GDR. Just like his father, Ron stretched the yellow shirt’s
long sleeves until they covered his thumbs. The resemblance was uncanny
“The way I played and moved reminded many of my dad”, Ron recalled. “I had apparently
inherited many of his mannerisms. It got to the point that my mother felt she had to get
involved. She walked up to the fathers of the other players and asked them to please
stop all those comparisons with my dad.”
But there was no escaping the stigma that clung to his second name like a clump of mud.
He was never named captain, never got called up to any of the youth national teams. Travelling
abroad for matches was out of the question, too.
Then, his victimisation became more obvious. In 1985, Lok Leipzig Under-15s were playing
a game to entertain an 80,000 crowd in Leipzig’s Zentralstadion as a warm-up for a GDR vs France
World Cup qualifier. Ron was already inside the stadium when he was told there was no
point him getting changed.
“They explained it was impossible that ‘Berger’ should appear on the scoreboard. I was the
son of a traitor.” Soon after, his fledgling football career was over for good. Lok Leipzig
kicked him out.
“You have your father to thank for that,” their president said.
“My dream of becoming a professional died that day,” Ron says. “It would have been
too embarrassing and too risky for the GDR to see me, of all people, turn into one the
country’s elite players.”
School became a problem as well. Ron wanted to stay in college to do his Abitur, the equivalent
of A-levels. His grades were good enough but he was turned away.
In the summer of 1989, the Iron Curtain was twitching. 50,000 GDR citizens fled to the
West via Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Jorg and Ron agreed to meet in Prague. With
the help of a politician who sat on Eintracht Frankfurt’s board, Jorg secured a diplomatic
passport — an insurance policy in case the Stasi were still attempting to repatriate
him.
Some people recognised the Eintracht Frankfurt manager and asked him for autographs and photos
in the street. “
I couldn’t quite deal with the situation and hardly spoke a word”, remembers Ron.
Back at the hotel, he unpacked a suitcase full of gifts, shirts and memorabilia from
Frankfurt, but I hadn’t come for presents. All I wanted was to meet my father, to get
to know him. It felt more as if I had won a weekend with a Bundesliga coach in a competition.”
After the Wall came down five months later, Ron moved to an apartment not far from the
home of his father
“Little by little, my son started trusting me again. It simply took much longer than
I had thought,” Jorg wrote. He himself needed another 20 years until he could publicly acknowledge
that his family and friends should have been more important to him than the glory and success
he had sought for “selfish and superficial” reasons.
Some were able to adjust to the new realities in the reunified Germany much quicker.
Jorg was outraged to find Wolfgang Riedel working as a treasurer for one of the German
FA regional federations in 1991. Riedel, a former GDR FA official, had been a communist
hardliner and responsible for organising the manhunt for Jorg after his getaway from Subotica.
Another man, a doctor Jorg had last seen handing out all manner of colourful pills to his GDR
junior team in the mid-Seventies, had become the German FA’s official anti-doping commissioner.
He also uncovered that two of his closest friends had spied on him for many years in
service of the Stasi. One of them, football coach Bernd Stange — until recently the
manager of the Syria national team — had agreed to set up a meeting with Jorg with
a view of getting back him back to the GDR. “They had planned to abduct me,” Jorg
wrote in disgust.
There’s a Stasi file for Ron, too. But he’s never been tempted to read it. He doesn’t
want to delve into the past for fear of unearthing some unpleasant truths about friends, team-mates,
teachers or coaches.
Jorg passed away in 2010, aged 66, after an intermittent seven-year-battle against cancer.
His father’s death led Ron to reassess his own life. He had founded and run a very successful
sporting-goods company but had neglected himself and his family for decades in the process.
To find a much healthier balance, he sold the firm a couple of years ago.
The 30th anniversary of the Wall’s fall has brought about a renewed interest in Jorg
and the footballing aspects of the Cold War in Germany; a theatre play about him was staged
in Frankfurt recently. Ron is pleased people still admire him as one of the Bundesliga’s
most charismatic operators, especially in Frankfurt, even if his own memories will continue
to be coloured by the events of March 1979.