One night in 1961 the Berlin Wall went up. It left Helmut Klopfleisch, 13 years old, stuck in East Berlin, unable to cross town to watch his beloved football club, Hertha BSC, in the west. So he and other Hertha fans in East Berlin spent Saturday afternoons standing beside the wall, listening to the stadium just across the frontier. When the crowd at the ground cheered, the group behind the Iron Curtain did too. Eventually the border guards sent them packing. However, Mr Klopfleisch remained a Hertha fan. In fact East Germany spied on and persecuted him for supporting western football teams.
On November 9 1989 the wall fell. Soon after, I met Mr Klopfleisch, and listened to his story open-mouthed. I had always thought that football and politics intertwined, but had never expected anything quite so bizarre. When I saw him in Berlin last month, he taught me a lesson about eastern Europe 20 years on.
Mr Klopfleisch is a large, moon-faced extrovert, a former electrician, but above all a born anti-communist. He saw through the system from childhood. As the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, warned in the thick file it kept on him: "K has a good mental grasp and is able to recognise connections." (Had the Stasi not always used his initial, the file would read less like Kafka.) Most eastern Europeans learnt to dissimulate, but Mr Klopfleisch did not. He never grasped what it was to live in a totalitarian state. Wrongly, he assumed that common sense and decency would apply.
"The leisure interests of the K family are largely limited to football and their weekend plot of land . . . " says the Stasi file. Or as Mr Klopfleisch told me: "The best times in East Germany were in our summer house. It was quiet, no communist propaganda, and we'd sit there on a summer's evening watching western football and we'd be happy. It was our Little California."
He also drove around the eastern bloc to cheer on visiting western teams. The Stasi accompanied him everywhere. "K, by his behaviour at the People's Republic of Bulgaria vs the Federal Republic of Germany, has significantly damaged the international reputation of the GDR," an agent reported sadly.
The Stasi often interrogated him. An agent named Hoyer told him that if he wanted to watch a visiting west German team, he should consult the Stasi first. The file recounts: "This did not appeal to him at all, he stated that in that case he would lose all pleasure and interest in the match. He already had the impression of being under control."
Finally, in 1989, the Stasi told him he could leave the country. But Mr Klopfleisch's mother had just hours left to live. Mr Klopfleisch recalled: "I told the Stasi and they said: 'Just hours, we know. Either you leave today, or never.' " He left for west Berlin. His house at Little California was confiscated.
Months after he left, the wall fell. Wrongly, Mr Klopfleisch thought that finally justice would be done. Instead, as part of the deal on German reunification, most communists and spies were left unpunished. A Stasi agent, who had spied on Mr Klopfleisch from the church beside his flat, took over Little California. Mr Klopfleisch has tried for 20 years to get the house back.
He is currently in a west Berlin hospital. When I visited him there, he talked happily about football but kept returning to his pain at seeing former communists live happily ever after. Someone asked if he viewed his battle with the late GDR as a sort of football match. "A match lasts 90 minutes," Mr Klopfleisch sighed. "This one just went on forever." It still hasn't ended for him. Today most of us treat the wall as a piece of kitsch, and the anniversary of its fall as a blithe party. But some people across eastern Europe will keep hurting until they die. * Simon Kuper's new book Soccernomics has just appeared in the US (Nation Books, $14.95)
simonkuper-ft@hotmail.com
