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Diana bathing
Cathedral, interior by night toward the altar
The Elbe River - Dresden
Semper Oper - DresdenRudolf-Harbig-Stadion: Memories of a Football Game
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Although I do not have a good photo of this, just a shot against then sun from the tower of Kreuzkirche I want to write some lines about it.
It reminds me so much of my first Dresden visit when the city was still part of GDR, and we needed visas to be allowed into Germany’s East.
I was there to cover an UEFA Cup game of VfB Stuttgart against Dynamo Dresden. And of course, the Stasi people controlled every step we made, every breath we took, every word we said… There was one telephone on the tribune for all journalists.
A kind of telecom lady administered it. She sat next to us with the telephone on her lap. Our colleagues back home had to call us, registering the calls. Direct calls were not possible, everything went via the western Telekom centre. You felt like a pioneer reaching the South Pole when you had succeeded talking to your colleagues on the phone, get the information about the game through, so it could be printed in the next day’s newspapers.
Here it reads much easier than it was, and back home the papers had to collaborate and exchange the information we had given them on the phone, as not everybody had got through in time.
Surely it was before the times of broadband, mobile phones and all those communication miracles of nowadays. But to imagine that you could not make direct calls from one part of Germany to the other, just because they had erected a border in between, really shows how inhumane the GDR system was, and the people prisoners within their borders. -
The UEFA Cup game I attended was the semi-final return game, and ended 1:1. As Stuttgart had won the home game 1:0 they went through to the final against SCC Naples, then with Diego Maradona (Nice trip to Naples BTW although Stuttgart lost – but Diego cheated, and the referee did not see it ;-)
The Dresden game was on 19 April 1989. Some months later the world changed – and Dresden’s star player Matthias Sammer signed with Stuttgart… He was ginger-haired and could get fox-devils-wild on the field, and sometimes even was sent off for his bad temper. But I remember him as a very polite, professional and good character; I always liked him and keep a good memory of him.
The name of Dresden’s stadium has more significance to me – as I come from athletics (track and field). Rudolf Harbig was a fantastic runner, holding the world records over 400 and 800 metres in 1939 and 1941. He died in World War II, in 1944, on the East Front. Since 1950 the German Athletics Federation DLV presents an honourable athlete with the Rudolf-Harbig-Preis, handed over on the last day of the national championships.
