Hansa Rostock: The rise and long demise of an East German football institution

In 1991, Hansa Rostock became the last club to win the East German championship. Now more than 30 years later, a once proud club has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

There was a magazine that I cherished. I think it was produced by “Sat.1” and their Bundesliga show “Ran”. But now, three decades later, I can’t remember with certainty. What I do remember, though, was one particular issue on East German football that featured Hansa Rostock stars Matthias Breitkreutz, Stefan Beinlich, and Steffen Baumgart—yes, the now former 1. FC Köln coach—on the cover page.

This particular issue focused not just on the emergence of Hansa Rostock as a powerhouse in the 1995/96 season but also on the history of East German football. Although the Wall had come down just six years prior and East German football was only integrated ahead of the 1991/92 season, for an 11-year-old growing up in Munich, Die DDR seemed a lifetime away.

With that in mind, this team located on the Baltic Sea playing incredible football in the Bundesliga as a newly promoted side, and their players sporting the Vokuhila (vorne kurz hinten lang or, in English, the mullet) were about as exotic as some of those Eastern European teams 1860 Munich were drawn against in the UEFA Intertoto Cup on a regular basis—I am old enough to remember a game against KAMAZ Naberezhnye Chelny. After all, this was a time before the Internet and Transfermarkt. Looking up clubs and players was a matter of reading about them in magazines.