Letter from Berlin:The ghost of East Germany came back to haunt the country three times last week, each visit more surreal than the last.
The first came when criminal police admitted taking scent samples from far-left activists arrested in raids ahead of next week's G8 summit on the German Baltic coast.
A sample can be given to a sniffer dog to locate a person in a crowd, or their scent at a crime scene. Civil rights activists said the measure recalled the hundreds of thousands of samples kept by East Germany's paranoid secret police, the Stasi.
Another GDR ghost appeared when Hamburg police admitted spending two days in a postal sorting office opening letters in their hunt for the individuals behind a series of arson attacks that have left the homes of leading company managers covered in paint and their luxury cars smoking wrecks.
Monika Harms, Germany's top public prosecutor, defended the scent samples and post interception, saying it was inaccurate to compare present investigations with Stasi dragnets.
"We are not dealing with people from the political opposition like [ the Stasi] in former East Germany, but with criminals who send off confession letters," she told Der Spiegel magazine.
The third appearance of the East German ghost was the most interesting. Seven professional cyclists from the T-Mobile team, including one Tour de France winner, admitted taking banned drugs to boost their performance and prolong their careers.
Their drug of choice was erythropoietin (EPO). The tone of the confessions ran the gamut from two tearful mea culpas to the arrogant admission of 1996 Tour de France winner Bjarne Riis that he was still proud of his drug-enhanced results as a "cyclist on the terms of the time".
Apparently the terms of the time ruled that as long as EPO didn't show up in blood tests - a test was introduced in 2000 - it was legitimate to take it just to keep up with the pack, who were all on the drug too.
The 1997 Tour de France winner Jan Ullrich has refused to comment on the EPO allegations; he retired from cycling earlier this year facing separate drug allegations.
Considering the gravity of the admissions - that every T-Mobile cycling win in the last 15 years is, at best, doubtful, and at worst null and void - it's surprising that there have been no real consequences so far.
Deutsche Telekom has decided to stay on as team sponsor and has kept on board one of the repentant drug users as the team's sporting director, apparently to teach young cyclists about the dangers of banned substances.
"Using that logic, a confessed thief would become a policeman," said the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper yesterday.
A different approach followed revelations of East German teenage athletes who were unwittingly drugged to win Olympic medals and ease the politburo's inferiority complex. Many of these former athletes have gone to court demanding compensation for the severe health consequences of this state-sanctioned practice. The cycling doping was not state-sanctioned, but there seems little interest in identifying the pressures in the system that encouraged cyclists to inject themselves with illegal substances.
"The sporting associations have always tried to say it was a case of individual sinners but I've always said it is a widespread phenomenon," said Peter Danckert, head of the Bundestag's sporting parliamentary committee. "It's not just Germany, it's Ireland too. It's not just cycling either. For instance, I don't even want to think about what's happening in swimming."
Danckert has been the driving force behind a new anti-doping law, approved by the cabinet yesterday, which criminalises dealing in illegal doping substances but leaves the punishment of doped athletes up to their own sporting association.
He has called for a "doping amnesty" to clean up professional sports by allowing drug-taking athletes to come forward without legal consequences. That suggestion is unlikely to go anywhere, but at the very least the revelations prove that doping belongs to the country's capitalist present as much as the East German communist past.
"When this east-west comparison raises its head, it's always implied that East Germans were morally retarded," said Richard Schröder, a sociologist and author of The Most Important Misconceptions about German Unification.
"The notion that this kind of fraud was less present in the West is just hot air. It will always be there as long as there is public acclaim for athletes who demonstrate a willingness to break the rules to win."
