To take second place in the Olympics medal table is some major achievement, as an increasingly hysterical ‘Team GB’ media reminded us throughout this summer’s games. If it’s good going for a country of sixty million, it is extraordinary for one of seventeen, the size of the Netherlands or Guatemala. Yet in the 1970s and ’80s, this was the story of East Germany, der DDR, a nation that had competed separately only since the Mexico games of 1968. In the enemy’s back yard of Munich 1972, the DDR vaulted above its western sibling, and stayed there for the remainder of its days. In Montreal 1976, Moscow 1980 and Seoul 1988 (Warsaw Pact countries boycotted Los Angeles 1984), the medal table remained the same: 1st USSR, 2nd DDR. Neither country even existed by the time of the next games.
Whispers about the unnaturally burly East German competitors, the women in particular, soon proved true. The country’s Olympic miracle was built on mass state doping, often unbeknownst to the pitifully young competitors who were usually told that they were taking “vitamins”. Dark Mermaids takes us back to 1990, in the chaos of immediate post-wall Germany, and spins a seductive tale from this gruesome frontline of sporting politics.
Its heroine is Sophia Künstler, a child DDR swimming sensation at Montreal ’76, whose subsequent illness, a result of her doping, propelled her and her doctor father across the border to live in the West. When we first meet her, fourteen years later, she is a Berlin police officer. Her past ambushes her when a battered corpse is discovered in a city park: it is an old friend and swimming colleague from the same DDR home town.
The unfolding nightmare reels off in multiple directions, and Anne Lauppe-Dunbar spares us none of it. Shattered families, broken bodies and minds, brutality, rape and even murder were considered prices worth paying for the state to boost its status through sport. Lauppe-Dunbar marshals the facts of history deftly, and devastatingly, into her fictional characterscape. Her narrative is unflinching and darkly sensual, its evocation of the smell, taste and colours of fear, or of oozing bodily fluids and equally goopy emotions, immensely powerful.
So powerful, in truth, that it sometimes overwhelms the nuts and bolts of the plot, an occasional irritant in a story with many sharp twists, particularly towards the climax. But then she swoops back with lines of such pitch-black poetry that almost all is forgiven. This is much more a lyrical tour of a man-made hell than it is a police procedural page-turner.
Twenty-five years after its demise, the DDR remains the poster boy for doping in sport, though of course it rages on. Only recently have we learned that kindly, capitalist West Germany, so indignant at the Olympic success of its poor twin, embarked on its own dubious programmes in the 1970s. Russia remains under deep suspicion; others too. The DDR muscled its way to the overall Olympic silver by the foulest of means. Team GB, we’re told, did it on nothing stronger than lottery funding and pluck. Let’s hope that that remains the truth.