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Professor McDougall`s current research concerns the surprising political and social history of football, or, as Canadians know it, soccer, in communist East Germany. Using archival resources and interviews, he reconstructs the ways the game reflected and sometimes shaped relations between the authoritarian state and its citizens. Football asserted identities - individual, local, national, and international - that did not always meet with the approval of the communist regime, which in the 1970s and 1980s ran the world's most heavily policed performance sports program.While football was not a big part of East Germany's Olympic success story, for some players and fans it became a means of challenging, however indirectly, communist rule. |
