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 After “”  and the Youth of the World If the smooth initial handling of Munich’s Olympic project resulted from the consensual tone or “deideologization” that characterized West German national politics in the mid-s, its execution in finer detail would be troubled by forces of an unpredictable nature before the decade was out. The Mexico Games proved ominous. Were it not for the dubious decision of a thick-skinned government and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to carry on regardless, the  festival would have been ruined by radical politics. On  October , just ten days before the opening ceremony, a summer of violent clashes between students and police culminated in the Tlatelolco Massacre, which caused  deaths and , injuries within a stone’s throw of the Olympic sites.1 Exploiting the presence of international journalists, the protesters chanted: “We don’t want Olympic Games! We want a revolution!”2 Once underway, the Games were dominated by politics and are remembered as much for the Black Power salute of the AfricanAmerican medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos as for the warmth of the Mexican people and the extraordinary altitude-assisted performances of athletes such as Bob Beamon. In , of course, revolution was not the sole preserve of Mexican students. Across vast tracts of the Western world, “the cultural eco-system,” as Tony Judt has recently put it, “was evolving much faster than in the past. The gap separating a large, prosperous, pampered, self-confident and culturally autonomous generation from the usually small, insecure, Depression-scarred and war-ravaged generation of its parents was greater than the conventional distance between age groups.”3 In Western Europe, a rapidly expanding education system propelled huge numbers of young people into a tertiary sector hopelessly under-equipped  for the speed of cultural change, fomenting discontent. When events came to the boil, they were sustained by a common, heady mix of theory, sexual liberation, and the justification of violent means, but marked as well by distinct local inflections . In Germany, specifically, nascent unease with the older generation’s supposed amnesia about the recent past became acute. Not only did the Mitscherlichs’ psychoanalytical account of the nation’s unwillingness to recognize individual responsibility make it onto almost every student bookshelf (Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, The Inability to Mourn, ), but radical campus leaders vehemently placed the blame on the young Federal Republic, a system they viewed as an anaesthetized , Americanized offshoot of the consumerist West. From the immediate perspective of the Munich organizers, this unexpected return of ideology transformed the  Olympics into contested territory. How exactly were they to organize an event, defined famously since the days of de Coubertin as a celebration for the “youth of the world,” when its chief participants had become distinctly disaffected ? And how, in a national context, could “modern Germany” be adequately represented when the country was changing and challenging itself at a rapid rate? These were just some of the questions that faced the Organizing Committee (OC) as it entered its key phase of preparation in . In retrospect, as Judt also notes, “the political geography of the Sixties can be misleading,” “the solipsistic conceit of the age—that the young would change the world by ‘doing their own thing’”—proving ultimately “an illusion.”4 But this does not mean the mood of unrest was not keenly sensed by participants at the time, nor treated with any less urgency by those against whom their actions were directed. It is also clear that the demand for change, at first expressed with belligerent intent, was not immutable but changed itself over time, intensifying in some areas, modulating and dissipating in others. Even if many of the key decisions about the particular form the Games would take had been reached before the events of ; even if the mindset of influential organizers proved compatible with the emerging spirit of the age; and even if some of the most aggressive opposition to the Olympics among critical German youth had all but blown out by the late summer of , the ways in which the organizers engaged—fully, partially, or in censorial fashion—with the intellectual and social climate over time is a crucial element in the narrative of the Games. Just as the Munich Olympics should not be reduced to a mere Social Democratic Party (SPD) pageant, it would be misleading to view their relaxed atmosphere simply as a reflex of “.” Visitors to the Olympic Park might have been encouraged to “walk on the grass” and “pick the flowers...

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