Word: sportpalast
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...tunnel, where 57 East Berliners crawled to freedom last week, an escape of another sort was taking place. Concocted of cigar smoke and the reek of raw schnapps, a blur of spinning spokes and the beat of a brass band, this form of escape goes by the name of "Sportpalast Fever," and can be indulged in once a year when Berlin holds its famed, phantasmagoric Six-Day Bicycle Race...
More than 40,000 West Berliners jammed the drafty, bomb-wracked Sportpalast last week, paying $100,000 for the privilege of watching a handful of men in silk spin madly around a banked oval track, for prizes ranging from a few bottles of wine to a brand-new DKW sedan. To beleaguered Berliners, the Six Days serves as carnival, communal songfest and emotional blowout. Only a fraction of the crowd is made up of racing fans, and as one old man said of the event, "It would be great if it weren't for those cyclists...
Berlin's Six Days dates back to 1909. By the early 1930s, the races were often rigged, and they attracted the booted whores and gaudy gangsters who gave Berlin its cynical, sinful aura. Left-wing Playwright Georg Kaiser described the Sportpalast scene in those days: "Inhibition has gone to hell. Cutaways shake. Shirts tear. Buttons pop in all directions. Differences flow away. Nakedness where there used to be disguise: passion. It's worth it-this brings profits...
Dancing with Disrespect. Hitler outlawed the races soon after he came to power in 1933 because he found them dishonest and degenerate, and converted the Sportpalast into a propaganda forum. World War II left it a gutted shell, but in 1953 a group of enterprising promoters slapped a new roof on the ruin, installed a new track, and the Six Days was back in business...
Last week's race was, as usual, a ten-ring circus. The brassy oompah of Otto-Otto Kermbach's band thundered the Sportpalast Waltz-a ditty whose magic lies in the fact that every few bars the audience can join in with three short, shrill whistles. When enough beer and schnapps had flowed (nightly sales total 18,000 glasses of each), spectators swarmed onto the infield to dance. Fist fights flared in the smoky upper reaches of the grandstands, known as the "hayloft." The occupants of this low-cost Olympus exercise dictatorial power over the groundlings, demanding...