Paul Scraton on one of East Germany’s most significant sporting events…
We travelled west towards Magdeburg on country roads in early summer, ignoring the temptation of the fast-moving autobahn just beyond the horizon. The heat shimmered on the tarmac surface. Wind farms turned slowly in the breeze. The fields were the brilliant green of young corn and wheat, or else they shone yellow with the flowing rapeseed. We were approaching the Elbe river in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, but – as we passed a group of mid-week cyclists in bright lycra – it looked like the landscapes of the first week of the Tour de France.
We crossed the Elbe and its flood meadows on either side, spying the twin towers of Magdeburg cathedral from the high bridge before we dropped down again and into the next small, anonymous agricultural village. The storks had returned. Red kites hovered against the blue sky. A tractor worked the field. It felt like a timeless scene, but as so often in Germany, we approached the village of Kleinmühlingen with the knowledge of all that happened in these towns, across these fields and along the banks of the great river we’ve just crossed.
In Kleinmühlingen, a place that can trace its origins back to the Middle Ages as a Slavic village, that lost a third of its population during The Plague, was almost completely destroyed in the Thirty Years’ War, flew the swastika flag under National Socialism and found itself in the Russian occupied zone after World War II, we pulled up outside a small museum dedicated to none of these events but linked to the last: a new-ish building on a sidestreet, with a Dutch flag hanging from the guttering, a white dove of peace above the door and a mural on the side wall depicting cyclists struggling up a steep cobblestoned road in the middle of a town.
Before we were even out of the car, a cheerful man had stepped out onto the pavement and waited by an old blue turbo-trainer that he’d presumably left there for any local Kleinmühlinger who fancied a workout. This was Horst Schäfer, the man who built the Radsportmuseum Course de la Paix together with his wife and his friends, drawing cycling fans from around the world to his museum dedicated to the story of the Friedensfahrt – the Peace Race.
Born out of the ruins of World War II, this two-week stage race would become known, by those who didn’t really know it, as ‘The Tour de France of the East’. “But we don’t call it that,” Horst says with a smile, shaking my hand. “It was something different. Not to be compared. But come on, let me show you and tell you all about it…”
Inside, Horst’s wife Gudrun is in the kitchen making coffee. It looks like no museum I had ever been to before. The ground floor is an open space with a long table. There are cycling posters on the walls, and other bits and pieces of memorabilia, but in general it looks like a classic German ice cream cafe owned by someone with a particular hobby. The exhibits, Horst informs us, are mainly upstairs. But first he has a film to show us.
All Horst knew from our contact was that I was originally from the north of England, that I lived in Berlin, and that I wanted to write about the Peace Race. With this information he had decided he wanted to start the story from the beginning. He looked beyond me at my travelling companions. I was in Kleinmühlingen with my in-laws, Fritz and Gabi. They had, they told Horst, their own memories of the Peace Race, growing up in the GDR. He smiled. Once he discovered Fritz had spent his childhood in Potsdam, we became the ‘Potsdamer’ for the rest of our visit.
“I knew already, in 1991, that we would have to fight to keep the race going,” Horst says, as we settle down with our coffees. The Wall had come down, Germany was reunified, and traces of the socialist story of the previous forty years were being washed away by the tidal wave of history. “People needed to kn…