White Splendor and Big Plans

A hundred years ago Oberhof witnessed the birth of German winter sports. Hotel directors, property speculators and spa doctors discovered sport as a source of money. The nobility passed the time on the bobsleigh and toboggan runs. Within a few years the mountain farming village looked like St. Moritz. Thus began a breathtaking century that reached its climax in Walter Ulbricht’s vision of an exclusive winter sports resort in a republic “with no actual access to the Alps”.

When new ski jumps, a hideously expensive artificial ice track and, not least, the Interhotel Panorama – the republic’s finest establishment – were built in the 1960s and 1970s, the GDR completed in public ownership what had shaped the place for decades: a place dominated by the powerful, the vain, the functionaries and the private gentlemen. Here Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia rode the bobsleigh, the last Russian prince Kyrill improved his handicap, Joseph Goebbels took his holidays and Ufa stars resided in the golf hotel. It is this mixture of great competitions, hot amusements and social gatherings that makes the place irresistible to the elites – in the imperial era, in the roaring twenties, in the Third Reich. Ulbricht’s “St. Moritz of the GDR” also came into being here: his own guest house in 1964, the Panorama in 1967, the artificial ice track in 1969. The people who at an altitude of more than 800 metres defy the November fog, the cool summers, the masses of snow and the thaw are here because they want to make money and careers – as trainers or barmen, Olympic champions or gourmet chefs.

Using archive footage and eyewitness accounts, the film tells the largely unknown story behind Oberhof’s flat sporting façade. Newsreels and historical documentaries bring the place to life; interviews with historians, functionaries, hotel directors and athletes trace the fascinating history of a place whose fate was determined by the social and political establishment of the last century.