When the German Democratic Republic collapsed in 1990, thousands of coaches, doctors, trainers, and officials from its elite sports system entered a unified Germany that was still trying to understand what, exactly, the GDR had been. Their reputations now depended on how their pasts were interpreted—by newspapers, by athletic federations, by former teammates and rivals, and sometimes by courts. Some sought to defend themselves through interviews. Others tried to fight damaging statements in court. Still others discovered that defending themselves was complicated by missing documents, conflicting testimony, or shifting expectations in a country still learning to read its own history.
Three figures from GDR gymnastics—Ellen Berger, Klaus Köste, and Gudrun Fröhner—each confronted the same problem: how to assert their own account of the past in a new Germany where the rules, the evidence, and even the moral categories were changing under their feet. Their cases did not follow the same path, nor did they end in the same place. But all three illustrate how difficult—and sometimes impossible—it was to clear one’s name in the 1990s and beyond.
Ellen Berger: Defending a Legacy in an Antagonistic Climate
In late February 1992, Ellen Berger received a letter at her home in Strausberg from the German Gymnastics Federation (DTB). Berger, who had coached the GDR women’s team from 1958 to 1976 and went on to lead the FIG Women’s Technical Committee, opened it to find a formal questionnaire asking her to declare that she was never affiliated with the State Security service.[1] She was taken aback. “I’m not easily thrown off balance,” she told a reporter later that spring, “but I was truly shocked.”
What made the request confusing was its timing. Just three months earlier, Berger had already been questioned in person by the DTB presidium in Hamburg. She recalled that meeting as “a pleasant, open, and friendly conversation,” one in which she “could speak honestly and with a clear conscience.” The DTB had cleared her and forwarded her candidacy for another term as President of the Women’s Technical Committee of the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG). She had not expected the matter to return.
But it did—and now in writing, with sharper legal edges.
What Berger’s media interviews did not mention was that her questionnaire reflected a broader administrative shift. In the wake of reunification, the Reiter Commission—tasked in 1991 with advising how to handle doping and past misconduct—had recommended that former GDR coaches, doctors, and officials be retained only if they provided written guarantees of “clean and correct behavior” in the future. Written declarations allowed federations to demonstrate due diligence without conducting full investigations at a time when opened archives, media scrutiny, and political pressure made missteps costly. Berger’s questionnaire, though not about doping, was not an anomaly. It reflected the new bureaucratic logic of the early 1990s.
To a longtime sports official, that shift could have felt deeply personal. For Berger, the second questionnaire was not a procedural safeguard but a withdrawal of trust. She signed the form but withdrew her candidacy. “My first thought was: Why is there no trust in me?” she said. “But without trust, you can’t work together.”
In explaining her decision, she pointed to a broader change in the national mood. “A lot has happened since,” she observed. Although she had never been attacked personally—“not at all by colleagues from other countries”—the atmosphere at home felt markedly different. “The climate in our own country toward officials who came from the East has grown worse.”
The forces behind that shift were visible everywhere. In gymnastics, reunification had begun with promises of partnership. But by the time the East German Turner- und Sportbund (DTV) and the West German Deutscher Turner-Bund (DTB) formally merged in 1990, the language of equality had vanished. The DTB absorbed the five new state associations from the former East, and virtually none of the DTV’s leadership made the transition. Of fifty full-time positions in the unified federation, not one went to an official from the East.
Meanwhile, in the larger world of German sport, suspicion intensified. In 1991, Doping-Dokumente exposed the scale of state-directed doping in the GDR. In 1992, the Stasi archives opened to researchers. Newspapers and magazines filled their pages with exposés and speculation. Being from the East now carried a presumption of complicity.
Outside Germany, colleagues struggled to understand her resignation. “Foreign gymnastics colleagues are completely surprised,” Berger said. “They can’t understand at all what kind of problems we have with each other here in Germany.” Their confusion reflected how specific this moment was to reunification—how much it depended on newly opened archives, political scrutiny, and an often indiscriminate suspicion that East German officials might be hiding something.
Berger herself emphasized that she was “not at all depressed.” She believed she had contributed something meaningful to the sport: expanding women’s gymnastics in countries where it barely existed, creating compulsory routines based on scientific analysis, and helping smaller nations compete internationally. That was her legacy as she understood it.
But a distinguished record could not insulate her from the pressures of the early 1990s. The problem was suspicion—ambient, structural, and persistent. Berger had done what was asked of her twice. She had answered questions, offered explanations, and signed a formal declaration. But in a climate where trust had eroded and the burden of proof fell disproportionately on those from the East, clearing one’s name meant constant questions and a legally defensible paper trail.
Faced with that reality, Berger stepped aside. Her departure was not about guilt or innocence. For her, it was about the impossibility of being believed.
Klaus Köste: Code Name “Michael Voronin”
If Berger stepped back from public conflict, Klaus Köste stepped directly into it. But unlike Berger, he attempted to fight his battle in court—an effort that would do more to confirm lingering doubts than dispel them.
In 2001, Köste filed for an injunction to stop the Süddeutsche Zeitung from calling him “a doped Olympic champion and a coach who was thoroughly informed about the severe bodily injuries of his gymnasts.” In a sworn affidavit, he insisted that he had never knowingly taken doping substances as an athlete, nor had he knowingly coached gymnasts harmed by doping.
But two obstacles stood in his way.
The first was a paper trail. His Stasi file included a handwritten commitment dated April 5, 1977, in which Köste—assigned the alias “Michael Woronin,” the name of a Soviet rival—agreed to inform the Ministry for State Security about what he witnessed as a gymnastics coach. The reports showed that he had described the health conditions of the women he coached and the treatment methods used to keep them training through injury.
The second was testimonial. In response to the lawsuit, a former teammate and roommate—someone widely known in the gymnastics world—submitted a sworn statement. From 1967 to 1975, he said, national team members, including Köste, had taken Oral-Turinabol and discussed its effects openly. During the 1972 Munich Olympics, he recalled, Köste had taken Oral-Turinabol and a second substance, a brain-active hormone known as “B17,” to boost performance.
Put plainly, Köste had become an Olympic vault champion while taking performance-enhancing drugs—substances that, to be clear, were not explicitly prohibited by the IOC in 1972.
Once the sworn testimony and Stasi file were before the court, Köste withdrew the lawsuit, telling Neues Deutschland that he would abandon “further attempts to find out the truth, because I am certain these spirals of lies are endless.” The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung offered another interpretation, noting that, “after reading his opponents’ brief, Köste was apparently not entirely confident he could win the case.”
Yet withdrawal did not end his life in the world of gymnastics. Despite the Stasi file and sworn testimony, the German Gymnastics Federation brought him on as a volunteer adviser for the 2002 German Gymnastics Festival in Leipzig. DTB President Rainer Brechtken defended the decision, arguing that Köste had “revealed himself to us” and that, as a coach, he had “only reported on the health condition of his gymnasts”—a process Brechtken described as routine. Most importantly, “Köste is not employed by us as a trainer,” he said; he was simply one of thousands of unpaid volunteers supporting the festival. The line the DTB drew was clear: a Stasi past and allegations of doping complicity did not bar someone from taking on temporary, unpaid work.
But even this limited role could not sever him from his past. The record remained, ready to resurface whenever his name did. When he died suddenly in 2012 at 69, the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung obituary honored his athletic achievements—vault gold, three Olympics, thirty-four national titles—but still noted that he had once been “assigned the cover name ‘IM Michael Woronin’ by the Ministry for State Security.” His achievements remained indisputable; his past, inescapable.
Köste could outlive the system that created the codename, but not the codename itself.
Gudrun Fröhner: The Case Defined by Absence
If Berger’s challenge was political and Köste’s legal, Gudrun Fröhner’s was epistemological. Her attempt to clear her name unfolded in courtrooms where some of the most important documents were precisely the ones nobody could produce.
In January 1998, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that microbiologist Werner Franke had identified two entries in a classified catalog of GDR literature on “supporting means” (unterstützende Mittel)—East Germany’s euphemism for doping. The catalog listed two studies on gymnastics, dated 1978 and 1980, under the name of Gudrun Fröhner, who had served as team doctor for the GDR gymnastics federation from 1977 to 1985. Franke had access to the catalog. Neither he nor historian Giselher Spitzer, however, had the studies themselves; the works had not been found.
In the litigation that followed, both men relied on other once-classified material. A steroid report by endocrinologist Winfried Schäker and a dissertation by Günter Rademacher—documents from the Leipzig Research Institute for Physical Culture and Sport—each cited a study by Fröhner in connection with experiments on gymnasts in 1979 and 1980. Minutes from an elite-sport working group—later recovered by ZERV—listed Fröhner, alongside several colleagues, as responsible within the theme area “unterstützende Mittel / State Plan Theme 14.25,” a bureaucratic designation that placed her inside the GDR’s doping research structure without clarifying what, exactly, she had done. And the works by Fröhner that Schäker and Rademacher cited? They were missing. They showed up in footnotes and catalog entries, but not in the archive.
Despite this gap, Spitzer accused her publicly of complicity in human experimentation and in helping to make young athletes dependent on drugs. Fröhner responded by suing him and Franke.
Her defense shifted over time. At first, she denied having taken part in doping research. She told reporters she did not know the publications attributed to her, said she had only learned of the GDR’s doping practices in the 1980s, and insisted—later under oath—that she had protected gymnasts from both doping and extreme dieting regimens.
By the autumn of 1998, her account had become more complicated. In October, during a civil proceeding in Berlin, her lawyer, Friederike Schulenburg, confirmed that Fröhner had administered the anabolic steroid Oral-Turinabol to underage gymnasts. A few months later, at the Berlin Court of Appeal, Schulenburg added that her client had also given a steroid substance she called “STS 672” in small doses. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung noted that she likely meant STS 646—a synthetic steroid never approved as a medication—and pointed to a statement by GDR doping doctor Manfred Höppner, who told investigators that Fröhner had collected this preparation from the Sports Medical Service in Berlin.
But Schulenburg insisted this was not doping. It was therapy, she argued—hormone preparations administered in minimal doses, according to the so-called Kaiser Schema, to counteract the catabolic effects of hunger and hard training and to prevent growth disturbances.
Fröhner, for her part, produced her own counter-evidence. She submitted an affidavit from Heinz Langer, former head of the FKS endocrinology laboratory, stating that her name had been entered on the minutes of a colloquium on doping questions without her knowledge. Her defenders also pointed to statements from thirty-three former gymnasts who said they had enjoyed working with her.
Against this backdrop of clarifications, denials, and missing documents, the courts faced a narrow question: not whether Fröhner had doped athletes, but whether Franke and Spitzer were legally permitted to say she had.
Presiding judge Michael Mauck framed it bluntly. He personally, he said, had no reason to believe that Fröhner had doped anyone. The question before the court was whether Spitzer and Franke, given the documents available to them, were allowed to believe it—and to say so in public. The court held that their statements remained permissible within the bounds of academic freedom.
In the end, her legacy remained contested: implicated by the documents that survived and shaped by the documents that never surfaced.
A Name in Pieces
These three cases showed that clearing one’s name required far more than defending oneself. It required control over the narrative itself.
In East Germany, that control had once seemed almost straightforward. The SED leadership set the line; the state media repeated it. Within that system, there was effectively one sanctioned version of events—the party’s.
But once the GDR vanished, so did its official story. And without it, interpretation fragmented. The same documents, the same actions, could now be read in sharply different ways.
For Berger, this shift felt personal. International criticism had always come with her FIG role; what stung in 1992 was mistrust at home. The DTB’s repeated questionnaires suggested that no explanation she gave could bridge the new Germany’s doubts about the old system she came from.
Klaus Köste faced a similar uncertainty. When he sued the Süddeutsche Zeitung for calling him “a doped Olympic champion” who knew about the harm done to his gymnasts, he hoped to assert his own account. Instead, his claims collided with Stasi files and conflicting testimony, and he dropped his lawsuit.
Gudrun Fröhner encountered the same logic in her defamation case against Franke and Spitzer. Her lawyer insisted she had followed legitimate medical practice when administering steroids; the court ruled the scholars could still describe her work as doping. Her professional identity and her critics’ accusations now stood side by side, equally plausible.
And then came the afterlives of these reputations.
In early 1992, when Berger withdrew her candidacy for another FIG term, the Berliner Zeitung called her “held in high esteem worldwide for her expertise.” Foreign colleagues were “completely surprised” by her resignation; they “can’t understand at all what kind of problems we have with each other here in Germany.”
But esteem was never universal. When Berger died in 1997, Evenimentul Zilei, a Romanian tabloid, ran an obituary titled: “Ellen Berger has died, the head of the jury who stole Nadia Comăneci’s Olympic title in Moscow.” Nothing about her decades of technical leadership—only the 1980 beam score, and the grievance that had never faded.[2]
For seventeen years, Berger lived with two parallel reputations: respected by colleagues who valued her expertise, condemned by those who believed they had witnessed an injustice. In Germany after reunification, she was admired yet mistrusted; abroad, in some places, reduced to a single moment.
You could answer every question. You could step back with dignity. You could be praised for your work. And somewhere else, another audience could define you entirely differently.
Once the official story disappeared, so did the hope of a single vindication. There was no uniform name to clear, no stable record to set straight—only competing memories, and the impossibility of reconciling them all.
References
“Berufsverband für Kinderheilkunde nennt Behandlung verbrecherisch: Ärztin Fröhner gibt Anabolika-Vergabe zu.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 21, 1998,
“Des Dopings bezichtigt: Fröhner verliert die Berufung,” Berliner Zeitung, Feb. 16, 1999.
“Funktionäre des DDR-Sports formieren sich gegen ‘Kriminalisierung.’” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 14, 1998.
“Ganz einfach, nur Fliegen ist schöner als Turnen.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 18, 2002.
“Gudrun Fröhner darf Doperin genannt werden.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 2, 1998.
“Historiker darf Ärztin des Dopings beschuldigen.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Feb. 17, 1999.
Krüger, Michael, and Christian Becker. “Doping and Anti-Doping in the Process of German Reunification.” Sport in History 34.4 (2014): 620-643.
Jahn, Michael. “Eine Ära im Turnen geht jäh zu Ende.” Berliner Zeitung, Mar. 12, 1992.
“Olympiasieger Köste im Alter von 69 Jahren gestorben.” Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, Dec. 15, 2012.
“Richthofen nennt Frankes Anzeige ‘skandalös und rufschädigend.’” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 15, 1998,
Schmeißer, Sonja. “Ellen Bergers Rücktritt als TK-Präsidentin der FIG.” Olympisches Turnen Aktuell, no. 2, Apr. 1992.
Spitzer, Giselher, and Anno Hecker. “Salto rückwärts von Vorturner Köste Stasi-Mann als Turnfest-Animateur.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 15, 2002.
“Unhaltbare Vorwürfe oder gefährlicher Persilschein?” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jan. 1, 1998.
Vasilescu, Cecilia Marta. “A murit Ellen Berger, șefa juriului care i-a furat Nadiei Comăneci titul olimpic la Moscova.” Evenimentul Zilei, April 21, 1997.
Notes
- There had been rumors about Ellen Berger’s ties to the Stasi. Maria Simionescu, a member of the Women’s Technical Committee and an informant for Romania’s state security apparatus, wrote in a September 30, 1980 report for the Securitate: “This aggression manifests itself against us in particular, turning problems she might have with our representatives into problems with “Romanians” in general. For example, at Thonon les Bains, she reproaches Jaroslava Matlochová (C.S.R.) for having come to Băile Felix in our country for a cure: “How could you go to Romania, to the Romanians?” She got a very nice answer from her, telling her how well she had been received and what a special people we were. The majority of recent meetings have begun with reproaches against us openly in the Committee. At the Moscow O.G., in the finals for the beam, Titov Yuri, U.S.S.R., with a direct interest, capitulated, but not Ellen Berger. She was married and has a son who she told me works in the D.D.R. Security. For many years she’s lived with Helmut Grosse, an air force officer, who did specialist training in the U.S.S.R. They are both invited to the U.S.S.R. every year, and at the major competitions in 1979 and 1980 Grosse was invited home for dinner (all the time) by Soviet generals alone or with Ellen Berger.” Qtd. in Nadia and the Secret Police, Stejărel Olaru.
- Here’s how Sports Illustrated described Nadia’s beam routine in 1980: “Nadia began with a handstand, then a “walkover” (hand-aided flip) on the four-inch wide beam. She attempted a forward flip with a half twist, a move that’s hers alone. In it she twists in midflight, so that when she alights she is looking back at the spot from which she started. The flip took her perilously near the edge of the beam, and she wobbled for an anxious moment. A slight flaw. But she completed her exercise with a spectacular series of flips, dismounting on a double-twist back flip. She took a tiny step backward upon landing—another small flaw—but the performance had the largely pro-Soviet crowd cheering and applauding. Comaneci stood before them, hands on nonexistent hips, while the Romanian patriots chanted, “Hey, hey, Na-dee-ya!” The decision was now in the laps of the women judges.
“Until this moment, the gymnastic competition had proceeded with little incident. It now descended into chaos. The audience murmured in anticipation, but Nadia’s points did not appear on the electronic scoreboard. The yellow-bloused judges were haggling among themselves on the floor, and the crowd began to whistle in disapproval. Head judge Maria Simionescu of Romania separated herself from the argument on the floor and joined another at the officials’ table with Ellen Berger, a heroically proportioned East German who is the chief of the technical board of the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG). Federation President Yuri Titov of the U.S.S.R. was the next combatant. For 28 minutes the judges and officials wrangled, marching back and forth between the table and the videotape machines. Finally, Kolog Nonus, a member of the Moscow Olympic organizing committee, stepped briskly to the computer normally operated by Simionescu as head judge and, while she glowered at him, punched out Nadia’s score. As he did so, he was berated by the Romanian coach, Bela Karolyi, who had been arguing with everyone within earshot. The score came up 9.85. The Sports Palace fairly exploded with Russian cheering and Romanian whistling. Nadia? She was expressionless, even when Davydova, who has a teen-ager’s head on a 10-year-old body, stood above her—barely—to accept the gold. Nadia was obliged to share the silver with Gnauck.”