Across two decades, in the same city, two East German girls lived out almost identical stories.
In the 1960s, Christiane Fröhlich was a sturdy child with quick reflexes and the kind of discipline coaches called turnerisch veranlagt—born for gymnastics. By seven, she was training five days a week; by sixteen, she was broken. Her coaches pried her knees backward to force flexibility, held a lighter under her calves when she could no longer lift her legs, and starved her until her vision went black. When she finally retired, her body was permanently damaged—spine fused with metal, nerves shot, walking possible only with crutches.
Two decades later, Antje Wilkenloh, the last East German champion, followed the same path through the same city. She, too, was chosen young, molded by repetition, and told to ignore pain. By thirteen, she was training up to six hours a day, her childhood disappearing into drills and conditioning. Fear of the coaches kept her silent as injuries accumulated: swollen fingers, a broken nose from the uneven bars, operations on her elbow, toe, ankle, and knee. Like many girls around her, she took painkillers before practice because she knew what training would demand.
Despite the difference in years, their experiences map onto each other with striking precision: early talent, escalating injuries, pressure to perform, and an adult world that treated their pain as routine. Both entered the system healthy and hopeful; both left it with bodies that would shape the rest of their lives.
Their stories, told here through two contemporaneous Der Spiegel profiles—one published in 1994, the other in 1995—show what remained after the routines ended and the state itself was gone.
Fire Under the Calves
Children, the performance fetishists like to claim, can endure the hard labor of the gym without suffering health damage. The fate of a gymnast from Rostock proves the opposite: Christiane Fröhlich, once one of the GDR’s great hopes, went directly from child star to early retiree.
Originally published in Der Spiegel, December 25, 1994
Translated from the German
Christiane Fröhlich considers her life unbearable. She has already undergone twelve operations, and more will follow. She relies on crutches to walk, and combats her constant pain with morphine tablets. Sometimes, when her legs suddenly go numb, she simply collapses. And she lives in constant fear of becoming paralyzed.
“Sport destroyed me,” says the former gymnast, now 46.
And yet, bitterly, Fröhlich sometimes feels she should be grateful to sport. In the gym, she says, she learned the one ability that now keeps her alive: “Because I focused my whole life, from early childhood on, on training and pain, I learned how to suffer.”
As if to prove it, she straightens up on her living-room couch, where she spends most of her days due to limited mobility. Getting down the stairs from her fourth-floor apartment to the street takes great effort. There, a Nissan converted for hand operation—provided to her by the insurance company—is parked.
Only when she sits behind the wheel and drives through the streets of Rostock does she feel she’s “at least partly participating in normal life again.”
Fröhlich’s life story refutes the rosy thesis of sports officials who claim that high-performance sport is harsh but ultimately healthy. Her case shows what coaches, doctors, sports scientists, and psychologists—obedient executors of medal quotas—can do to young girls: they destroy small personalities until nothing remains but physical and psychological wrecks.
Biographies like Christiane Fröhlich’s rarely reach the public. It’s not that there are no other victims—there are many—but the damage usually becomes known only after the athletes’ names have long been forgotten and their files interest almost no one. This has allowed those responsible to dismiss injuries as mere accidents of fate.
But the suffering of the Rostock gymnast makes such indifference harder. Her story traces a direct path from child prodigy to early pensioner.
At seven years old, Christiane trained five times a week. Because the sturdy girl showed athletic promise, she was admitted to the newly founded Children’s and Youth Sports School (KJS) in Rostock.
With her first certificates from youth competitions, her life shifted from school to the gym. She left home at 6:15 a.m. and returned at 8 p.m. Weekends were often fully devoted to sport.
Without complaint, she submitted to whatever her coaches demanded. Her first injuries—a broken ankle, a severe sprain, and a fractured shin—seemed like ordinary sports mishaps.
To ensure that judges made no deductions for flexibility, her knees were hyperextended: she had to sit on the floor with her heels on a gymnastics box while her coach leaned down with full force on her knees until the ligaments stretched and the desired “saber legs” appeared.
To build endurance in her legs, she trained with metal cuffs. During ballet, if she couldn’t lift her tired legs high enough, a coach would hold a lighter under her calves to force her to keep going.
Christiane never complained. The celebration of her success in the party press was compensation enough for the pain. She was one of the first women in the world to perform a Yamashita vault, a move until then seen only in men’s gymnastics. Her free cartwheel on beam was considered a sensation by German specialists. The GDR nominated her for the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico.
She began to worry about her body only when, during a training camp, she fell hard during a floor exercise and her knee swelled painfully. The sports doctor wrote in his report: her knee problems were either rheumatism or gonorrhea. The gymnast was 16 and still a virgin.
The coaches told her that their salaries depended on the athletes’ results. Their tone was cold and transactional. When she made a small mistake at a competition, a supervisor hissed, “If we only had girls like you, we’d starve.”
Even her request to leave competitive sport was denied—the state had invested too much in her.
Christiane had long become an object of a system that claimed young bodies and molded them like clay. The officials, hungry for medals, demanded constant results. Training became pure torment. Her left ankle was repeatedly sprained; her knee continued to trouble her; she complained of back and hip pain. When she pointed out a small lump along her spine, no one paid attention.
Worst of all was the hunger. Officials in Berlin decreed that the strong, 1.69-meter girl could weigh no more than 55 kilograms. Though she burned calories like a factory worker, she had to follow a strict diet: in the morning, one dry crispbread with an egg; at lunch, 150 grams of watery rice; at night, at most some fruit. Once a week was “milk day”—a liter of milk was her entire food intake.
She had to record every meal in a “hunger diary.” When the school cook once gave her two sweet plums as dessert, a coach caught her, threw the food away, and forced her to run around the gym for 40 minutes. Sometimes, so weak from hunger, her vision went black and she fainted.
Since fasting wasn’t enough, she was given 16 laxative pills (Pyrilax) morning and evening. She was regularly sent for “fat-reduction cures” to the Baltic resort of Kühlungsborn, where she had to swim three times a day in the 17°C sea. The last traces of fat were massaged away underwater until her thighs turned blue. She received sweat-inducing pills and was “boiled” in a steam box. Every gram of body weight was meticulously recorded.
To this day, Christiane Fröhlich doesn’t dare walk the beach in a swimsuit. She still feels that “everyone is staring at me.”
These are the long-term consequences of a scoring system that only favors miniature gymnasts. Internationally, the required elements can now only be performed by girls emaciated to the bone. Many respond by secretly binge eating—or stop eating altogether. Numerous gymnasts suffer from anorexia; some, like former U.S. national gymnast Christy Henrich in the summer, die from it.
Like weight, all other natural “limitations” were fought by sports doctors. Christiane was secretly given pills to stop menstruation. She suffered allergic reactions and had to receive calcium injections. When her mother finally took her to a gynecologist, he was appalled at the “medication-induced suppression of menstruation” and condemned his sports-medicine colleagues.
In autumn 1967, during uneven bars training, Christiane fell twice in a row on her head and back. The result: neck stiffness—she had to lift her legs with her hands to climb stairs. Still, she dragged herself to practice. Only when a senior doctor happened to see her collapsed on a bench did anyone order a full examination.
Finally, she was allowed to quit elite gymnastics. She put away her scrapbooks and felt her career’s end as a “liberation.”
She looked forward to training as a teacher, enduring her lingering health problems with humor. At parties, friends laughed affectionately when the cheerful ex-gymnast twisted her feet so that she stood on her ankles.
Four years later came the first major blow: her daughter was born with a malformation. Doctors diagnosed Sturge-Weber syndrome—the child had glaucoma and a birthmark across her face.
Two more pregnancies ended in miscarriages. Genetic tests found no inherited disorders, but doctors suspected that the medications she’d been given as an athlete caused chromosomal damage leading to the malformation.
Other symptoms followed: water retention in the face, hands, and legs; hair loss; constant vomiting (“I just can’t keep it in”); and allergic reactions. Doctors now believe she was given additional, undisclosed substances—possibly anabolic steroids.
[Note: State-sponsored doping officially started in 1974, after Christiane Fröhlich’s time. However, steroid use in gymnastics started earlier.]
Her first operation came in 1982. The joint pain once blamed on gonorrhea turned out to be a torn meniscus. That same year, two ankle surgeries revealed that one “sprain” she’d been forced to train through had actually been a fracture with torn ligaments.
In 1988, she had her first back surgery for a slipped vertebra—exactly where she’d “always felt a bump.” The bolts of the metal plate later broke. More surgeries followed, but healing was impossible: pieces of metal had grown into the spinal canal. Now her lumbar spine may have to be fused.
Doctors often told her, “Ah, a high-performance athlete—say no more.” Only now did she realize that her condition surprised no one. Even the fleeting glances of her former tormentors on the street betrayed guilt: the doctors who examined her at KJS should never have cleared her for elite gymnastics—she had a congenital hip defect.
Despite her efforts, she was never able to obtain her full medical records. Many ailments went undiagnosed. Damage spread to the kidneys, liver, heart, and bladder. A defective adrenal gland was only discovered after she fell into a coma following surgery.
Her ruined body isn’t the only legacy of gymnastics. She’s also been left socially marginalized. In Honecker’s workers’ state, “Honored Masters of Sport” were rewarded or compensated for injuries with generous pensions. Fröhlich, “de-selected” early, received just 295 marks a month.
Experts confirmed her physical damage resulted from training, yet her disability was rated at only 30 percent. She couldn’t appeal because crucial medical files had mysteriously vanished. Today, she and her daughter live on 1,600 marks in pension and sick pay.
Left to bear the “financial, physical, and psychological consequences” alone, and needing surgery only a few specialists could perform (none covered by insurance), Fröhlich wrote after reunification to the German Sports Federation. They passed her letter to the Federal Interior Ministry. A clerk replied that her case had been forwarded to the appropriate committees.
That was over three years ago.
“Nothing Left but Forgetting”
Originally published in Der Spiegel, December 24, 1995
Translated from the German
The small, compact body spins through the air as if wound up like a spring. Four times in a row, the gymnast in her pink leotard arches backward into a somersault. Then her spine seems to coil itself around the balance beam. She stretches her legs into a split—sometimes in midair, sometimes on the ten-centimeter-wide wood. The young athlete’s face is rigid, her lips pressed tightly together in concentration.
None of it escapes the television cameras. In close-up, they capture even the smallest movement. A soft-voiced commentator accompanies the acrobatic display.
“To achieve such artistry,” the TV man enthuses, “requires enormous talent and ten years of hard training.” When the girl dismounts with a twisting combination, he concludes with exuberance: “Antje Wilkenloh from Rostock is better than the world champion.” The GDR, he declares, has a new sports heroine.
Without visible emotion, 52-year-old Dieter Wilkenloh sits on his living-room sofa, watching the images playing from his VCR. Every detail of the broadcast from the 1989 Stuttgart Turnpokal he has stored behind his thick horn-rimmed glasses. He spent 400 marks to have an edited tape of his daughter’s routines made.
Only after the tape ends does the welding engineer get to the point. Yes, he still feels proud of his daughter’s achievements. But that others should delight in Antje’s contortions—and sell them to the public as the highest art of physical culture—makes him furious. “Gymnastics leads to economic and physical ruin,” Wilkenloh bursts out unexpectedly. The “filthy business” done with these girls, he insists, should be made public so that children and parents “finally keep their hands off it.”
Today, Wilkenloh’s daughter lives in a new housing estate on the outskirts of Rostock. The red-blond hair she once tied neatly into a ponytail now falls loose around her shoulders. She was recently married. And in her new home—decorated in beige and gray—there is no sign of the gymnastics that dominated her life for thirteen years. Only two trophies remain, tucked away on the bottom shelf of the wall unit, as if hidden.
At 23, Antje Wilkenloh wants distance—“to forget, once and for all.” And sometimes she succeeds: when she feels no pain in her feet or knees, when her backache doesn’t keep her awake at night, or when her stomach finally gives her peace.
Six years have passed since the Stuttgart competition, and Antje’s career has long been over. Yet the family’s life is still overshadowed by the path that once led her to become an elite gymnast. Only in how they cope with the past do the parents and their daughter differ.
Antje tries to endure, without complaint, the scars her body still bears. She keeps her distance from everything connected to that “other, darker life.” “I don’t want to hear or see anything about gymnastics ever again,” she says.
Her parents, moved by compassion for their child’s suffering, are still searching for those responsible. For a long time, they hoped for compensation — in vain. They speak openly of a “criminal sports system” that consumed hundreds of children — but no one wants to listen. They want to warn others and prevent more young athletes from being driven to ruin “for the sake of officials’ success and prestige,” yet their voices go unheard.
Antje was the last gymnastics champion of the vanished GDR. What remains of the final world-class gymnast produced by Germany is a body that can only be seen as a kind of memorial — a reminder of the ruthless exploitation of children’s physical talent.
Dieter Wilkenloh seems almost embarrassed as he opens the gray album filled with photos and newspaper clippings from the start of his daughter’s career. The first caption reads: “The gymnasts of the Fish Combine Training Center, Rostock 1981.” It shows seventeen cheeky-looking girls; Antje, elbow resting coyly on her knee, smiles at the camera. On the next page is her participant card for the “8th Children’s and Youth Spartakiade.” At the “GDR Best Evaluation,” it says, Antje placed first on vault.
“She really was so talented,” Wilkenloh says. It sounds like an apology for having once encouraged his daughter’s career. In the beginning, it all seemed so playful. Antje looked like she was having fun, and it was amusing to watch her, only six years old, walking on her hands back and forth through the apartment.
“In truth, we were lied to and deceived,” says Wilkenloh, arranging the correspondence with lawyers, club officials, and doctors on the living room table. When he now denounces all those who exposed Antje to the excesses of elite sport, there is an undertone of self-justification in his anger.
The father is tormented by guilt. He, too, had pushed his daughter from one competition to the next with slogans about perseverance. When she “looked especially miserable again”—a memory he still cannot shake—he would cheer her up with promises of bright prospects and future victories.
At nine, the gifted child was assigned to the sports club Empor Rostock, where the training load steadily increased. By thirteen, she was practicing up to six hours a day. School became secondary. “I didn’t know what free time was anymore,” Antje recalls of her lost childhood.
Her father watched the drudgery, consoling himself that all those hours in the gym would eventually be rewarded. After all, the GDR officials had promised that his daughter would be properly compensated for all the sacrifices.
But when her career ended, disillusionment set in. The four-time national champion received 12,000 East German marks as a “one-time compensation payment,” according to the accompanying letter—ostensibly for her “extended school years.” A meager reward, Antje thought, “for a ruined body.” She had to face the realization that she had suffered in vain, sacrificed to fulfill the quotas and plans of others.
“We were always in pain, really,” she says, running one hand over the fingers of the other. They had once been almost permanently swollen. She broke her index finger three times, her metacarpal once, and even her nose after hitting the bars. At twelve, she underwent her first surgery—for cartilage damage in her elbow.
Gymnastics became pure torment. Out of “fear of the coaches,” she kept going. Antje often complained of headaches after hitting the floor hard while learning new elements. “We got used to taking two or three painkillers before training,” she recalls, “because we knew exactly—it’s going to hurt again.” Soon, she couldn’t manage without them. Her stomach problems, she suspects, date from that time.
The intervals between injuries grew shorter and shorter. Antje had to undergo surgery on the base joint of her big toe, an arthroscopy on her left ankle, and later another operation on her right knee. In between came conservative treatments for her shins, neck, and repeated series of injections along her spine. She was hospitalized ten times in all.
At the Wilkenlohs’, illness became routine. The latest sprains, bruises, contusions, dislocations, and abrasions were barely worth mentioning anymore. What mattered more to the parents was keeping the emotional damage as small as possible. Antje had to be comforted, as one championship after another—Worlds, Europeans, the Olympics—took place without her because of injuries.
Dieter Wilkenloh realized just before the 1988 Seoul Olympics that his daughter was seen merely as raw material for the production of medals. During the GDR Championships, Antje injured a cervical vertebra. The attending doctor initially prescribed a four-week break from training. But only four days after the diagnosis, the sports officials—anxious about the approaching Summer Games—pressed for her to resume full preparation.
With every jump Antje felt “electric shocks” in her neck. After a double somersault she compressed her spine so severely that she lost her chance to experience the Olympics. In exchange, she was left with a chronic back condition; the pain haunts her to this day.
It was the following year that Dieter Wilkenloh realized he had entrusted his daughter to an environment increasingly willing to ignore every biological limit. The last feats were squeezed from Antje’s battered body. She won four national titles and became captain of the national team. But her joints once again rebelled against the unnatural strain. When the federation appointed a new coach—whom Antje “truly hated” for his brutal methods—the Wilkenlohs used the political upheaval of 1989–90 as their chance to end her career.
Yet even this unilateral decision to quit was not respected, not even in Rostock in 1990. Under the agenda item “Pest Control,” about twenty officials—some arriving from Berlin—tried to pressure Antje and her family. Because they considered her athletic potential a “bargaining chip” (as Wilkenloh put it) in the first unification talks with the West, they first tempted her with promises, then threatened financial repercussions. Medical reports were concealed or falsified. Antje held firm: “I simply couldn’t go on anymore,” she said. “I just thought: the only thing that matters is getting out.”
While Antje seems to have gained an almost endless distance from her athletic past, her father is still consumed by what the “unscrupulous coaches and officials” did to his daughter.
All the girls on the national team were bound by strict weight requirements. Anyone who was too heavy faced serious trouble. Out of fear of the scale, many stuck a finger down their throat after meals. In Rostock, most of the gymnasts chose instead to forgo eating and drinking altogether, licking only caffeine-laden drink powder. “The whole thing had one good side,” says the figure-conscious Antje with biting sarcasm, “to this day I still can’t stand anything sweet.”
Dieter Wilkenloh is of average build, and his wife Heidelore is of average height as well. Their son has grown to 1.78 meters. Only Antje’s body stopped growing at 1.50 meters. Why, Wilkenloh wonders today, “did my daughter stay so small?”
Chance? A quirk of nature? Or did the Dr. Mabuses of sport intervene—manipulating nature to clone ever more petite gymnasts capable of performing the most difficult routines?
Wilkenloh searches for answers. After the fall of the GDR, he reads in a magazine that before the 1980 Moscow Olympics, East Germany’s gymnastics team had been given the sex steroid Mestanolone, a hormone preparation normally used in pediatrics to treat children with a risk of excessive growth. Could that also explain why his daughter Antje didn’t get her first menstrual period until she was 18—after she had quit gymnastics?
Why, Wilkenloh still asks himself, would medal-obsessed officials have suddenly stopped using a drug that had already produced “excellent results” a decade earlier? He sends his daughter to the university clinic for testing. But it’s too late for proof, the doctors tell him.
Antje Wilkenloh quietly resigns herself to her fate as a premature pensioner. “From the sum of the injuries and diseases of the musculoskeletal system directly related to the sport of gymnastics,” a physician certified in June 1990, “the permanent physical damage amounts to over 20 percent.” Because of her deteriorated health, she is exempted from school sports.
At the beginning of this year, her past caught up with her one last time. Gudrun Fröhner, the former chairwoman of the medical commission of the GDR Gymnastics Federation, called her on the phone.[1] She promised a “thorough follow-up examination.” Antje saw it as a chance “finally to know exactly what’s wrong with me.”
But the examination turned out to be a particularly cynical form of window dressing. In a 24-page questionnaire “about the complaints” of former gymnasts, the “dear Antje” was asked whether she had taken the birth control pill, followed diet plans, and “shed many tears as a gymnast.”
“The same Frau Fröhner,” Dieter Wilkenloh rages, “who once took part in manipulating children, is now, under a scientific pretext, collecting the ‘scrap results’ of her own handiwork.”
“The same Frau Fröhner,” Dieter Wilkenloh rages—the same woman who took part in manipulating children—was now, under the guise of science, asking about the “scrap-heap results” of her own actions.
Instead of filling out the questionnaire, he sent back 37 questions of his own. Among them: “Were you ever ‘kept healthy’ with injections for over a year because of overuse injuries?” Or: “Were you expected to keep training while on bedrest?”
Antje Wilkenloh follows her father’s efforts with emotionless detachment. She knows that none of this can help her now. The increasing pain she feels when standing won’t go away, nor will she ever regain her ability to walk normally. And she doubts she can help future generations either. “Gymnastics just keeps getting more dangerous,” she says coolly. “It’s completely normal for the girls to end up broken afterward.”
Epilogue
As the articles illustrate, after the fall of the Wall, both women tried to rebuild ordinary lives. Neither fully succeeded. Christiane Fröhlich lived with a body held together by metal plates and repeated surgeries; Antje Wilkenloh carried chronic pain that shaped every choice she made in adulthood. What united them, across their twenty-year age difference, was the knowledge that the system had taken far more than it ever offered in return.
Their stories were not anomalies. Gabriele Fähnrich, Dagmar Kersten, and Dörte Thümmler described receiving blue pills passed off as vitamins and injections presented as routine care, never told what any of it was for. Fröhlich herself would never learn what she had been given; doctors could only guess years later. Meanwhile, the older forms of pressure continued unchanged. Thümmler recalled being knocked off the balance beam by a coach and pushed through injuries that later required surgery. And by 1988, internal reports were noting that the harm appearing in gymnasts’ bodies was shifting—new kinds of damage linked to the combination of extreme workloads and the biochemical substances used in the sport.
Read together, these experiences reveal the through-line of East German gymnastics: a system that routinely adjusted its techniques—adding pharmaceuticals, new pressures, new forms of monitoring—while holding fast to the belief that children’s bodies existed to serve its goals. The methods evolved; the assumption did not.
Sure, the GDR’s gymnastics machine expanded, innovated, and rebranded itself over the years. It became more organized and more resource-intensive. But in the ways that mattered most—in how it understood pain, childhood, and the limits of the human body—it never changed at all.
It grew more elaborate. But it never grew up.
Notes
- Gudrun Fröhner served as the East German gymnastics federation’s physician from 1981 to 1985. She was not charged in the Berlin criminal proceedings. Instead, she appeared before the Berlin Kammergericht in a defamation-related case concerning statements by historian Giselher Spitzer. In those proceedings, Fröhner denied having administered doping substances. Her lawyer nevertheless acknowledged that she had used both Oral-Turinabol and a steroid referred to as “STS 672” as part of her treatments, insisting these were medically justified within the framework of the so-called Kaiser Schema.
Source: “Des Dopings bezichtigt: Fröhner verliert die Berufung,” Berliner Zeitung, February 16, 1999.