Footballers like to say they can play in any position. Or play where the coach puts them. But only a few could present that with such solid arguments as Hans-Jürgen “Dixie” Dörner: He could demonstrably play in all positions. When he took part in the Uefa junior tournament in 1969, shortly before his debut as a senior national team player for the GDR (0-1 against Chile), he was registered as the second goalkeeper.
Even later, when he had long since prepared to become a legend of SG Dynamo Dresden and East German football, this sometimes happened. Of course, Dörner didn’t really get big as a keeper. But as a libero – a position that the GDR selection coach Georg Buschner gave him, although he had his doubts. “A little too small, not strong enough in the air, with a penchant for the elegant and casual” was the description that Buschner found for Dörner. And now that he’s passed away, it’s even more absurd than it was when Dörner was alive.
Dörner was called the “Beckenbauer of the East” with the same implicitness with which Joachim Streich passed for “Gerd Müller of the GDR”. As if Dörner and Streich hadn’t shone with their own light. “Beckenbauer des Ostens? All pepper,” said former Bundesliga coach Ede Geyer on Wednesday, just as the news of the death of his former team-mate Dörner became known.
Dörner was an exception in the GDR
Geyer needed his time to digest it: “He was an outstanding personality, a fantastic footballer and an even finer person.” Dörner himself once said that the name once flattered him, but later not so much: “I thought I was me.” And he was. An exceptional phenomenon of the football of a vanished country called DDR.
Dörner was associated with Dynamo Dresden for 51 years of his life.
(Photo: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa)
Dörner, born in Görlitz, celebrated his debut in the GDR A team without having played a single premier league game. This was followed by 558 competitive appearances for Dynamo; when he ended his career in 1986, he had achieved outstanding success. He had played 100 international matches, won five Oberliga championship titles and just as many FDGB cups, with the one from 1982 being marked with an asterisk: Dörner was not in the final, which says a lot about his rank.
On the eve of the final, he was suspended because of a red card he saw for a handball in the opposing penalty area – and since the final was against BFC Dynamo, the hand with which Stasi boss and BFC boss Erich Mielke was in The background pulled the strings to weaken the Dresdner, far more decisive than that of Dörner on the lawn. The Dresdeners still won the final.
Just like the GDR won against the FRG in Hamburg in 1974 without Dörner, through the famous Sparwasser Gate. After suffering from jaundice, Dörner was not fit in time to play the World Cup. In return, he won the gold medal with East Germany at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal after beating the legendary Polish team of Lato, Deyna, Zmuda and Tomaszewski 3-1 in the final.
In 2019, Dörner was inducted into the “Hall of Fame of German Football” as the only GDR footballer and symbolic figure of a team “that played the most attractive football in the country,” as Geyer says. Dörner had started as a striker. But he found his role as a libero. “There are many cases where attacking players go backwards with age. But that wasn’t the case with Dixie. He was an aesthetic, attacking-minded player who basically organized the game like a midfield director, reading the game insanely well could, set up goals – and scored himself,” says Geyer.
Dynamo also earned a reputation at European level in legendary duels that reached far beyond the Iron Curtain, against Ajax Amsterdam, Partizan Belgrade and FC Bayern. The low point: the 3:7 against Bayer Uerdingen in the quarter-finals of the cup winners’ competition. When the Wall fell three years later, in 1989, Dörner also became one of the many examples of how difficult the unification process was. And also for how condescending the West looked at the East.
However, this did not apply to Berti Vogts, who became national coach in the summer of 1990. He brought Dörner into his coaching team and got to know a person who seemed “inhibited and reserved at first” and had difficulty articulating his opinions. To this day, Vogts gives him credit for doing it. Because in those days the old GDR officials would have wanted to sing the players insistently.
After the 1996 European Championship, Dörner accepted the offer from Werder Bremen
In those days, Dörner communicated “extremely honestly and openly” – and that means: regardless of the ideas of the officials from the East – who was suitable for the now all-German team and who was not. Dörner’s only criterion was the ball. “He was technically unbelievable. Unbelievable!”, says Vogts. But that didn’t stop him from making a decision in 1997 that turned out to be a mistake.
After helping Vogts win the European Championship in 1996 as an assistant coach, Dörner accepted Werder Bremen’s offer. “I told him that he should wait. That he should stay in the DFB for two or three years and take over a youth team,” says Vogts. “But he said: Berti, I have to earn money.'”
Vogts says he advised against it because he thought that Dörner, this subtle person, would lack the toughness to assert himself in the Bundesliga and its media landscape. After a disastrous trip to Tenerife, Dörner was released in August 1997 by Werder, who was bottom of the Bundesliga at the time. He was “not broken” by it, Dörner later said table football said. “But secretly I’ve been wondering, why doesn’t your phone ring like other people’s?”
After that, he only got jobs from teams like FSV Zwickau, El Ahly Cairo, Lok Leipzig, most recently Radebeuler BC. But the memory of the player always remained. “You were way ahead of your time,” said Matthias Sammer, also from Dresden, on Dörner’s 70th birthday just a year ago: “Pep Guardiola would have enjoyed you,” and that should be anything but a lie.