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 Conclusion Olympic Legacies On the penultimate day of the Games, twelve hundred guests—including the International Olympic Committee (IOC), its outgoing and incoming presidents (Brundage and Killanin), and German politicians Heinemann, Brandt, and Goppel—had been expected at the Lenbachhaus gallery for an evening of champagne and sparkling conversation. But the terrorist attack several days before leadened the mood, and civic hospitality was cancelled as a mark of respect. Now extended by one day, the Games offered little joy or levity, as delegates, dignitaries , and athletes waited for a scaled-down closing ceremony before leaving Munich to its troubled Olympic legacy. When press officer Camillo Noel had delivered his text for the event on the eve of the Games to Vogel’s successor, Mayor Georg Kronawitter, he could scarcely have imagined the irony of his words. Despite the excitement of the opening week, no one could have returned home with an overwhelming sense that “the examples of our ability to understand one another , to make friends and maintain peace” had proved “stronger than the risk of conflict and contestation.”1 Kronawitter’s aborted speech, which took in the international context of the Games and their potential hard and soft legacies for Germany, Munich, and the Olympic movement, nonetheless serves as a convenient frame to conclude our discussion of the Games, their making and significance. Certainly, as this book has shown, the Munich Olympics were “caught up in the currents of power and conflict in human society.” They were caught, like the Federal Republic generally in the s, between past and future. Indebted to, but emerging from the pathos of a nineteenth-century tradition, they were enabled by technocratic optimism and shaped by the futuristic rationality of the early computer age. Buffeted by  student protest, they struggled to respond to radical youth demands while remaining faithful to the nonpolitical nature of the Games and the easygoing mood of its mainstream visitors. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), they had a rival that exploited the Olympic movement to make quasipolitical gains that were inaccessible through normal diplomacy, but who approached the Munich event with thinly veiled enmity. That rival, however, had Brandt’s rapprochement with the East to contend with, and ultimately the Soviet Union’s strategic decisions within a complicated process of international relations. The West German authorities came up against forces beyond their own control too, when Palestinian terrorists interrupted the Games and threw their Middle Eastern initiatives out of kilter. Each of these currents moved at different speeds, at different times, and impacted on different aspects of the Games. But these were only the external forces. As Johannes Paulmann—who has done much to advance the study of international representation—recently noted, “the inner dimensions of West German cultural diplomacy have so far not been studied adequately,” and these must be considered here too.2 Without wishing to reduce the often complex currents and influences presented in this book, it is worth noting the most significant factors in the inner evolution of the Munich event. First, there is the relation between individuals and collectives. On the one hand, despite the turmoil of  through , the Games would have been impossible without the deideologization that characterized the main political parties of the s and allowed them to proceed invariably with unity of purpose. In the combined support of city, Land, and nation, they profited moreover from the centrist orientation of the Republic and its “cooperative federalism.”3 Yet, individuals held the upper hand. Without Daume’s initiative, Vogel’s determination, and both men’s ambition , West Germany would not have contemplated hosting the Olympics at all. And without their steely resolve to produce the Games they wanted—variously for German sport, the Olympic movement, Munich, and the Federal Republic—the contours of the event would doubtless have developed differently. Echoing earlier complaints by Prince Georg von Opel, a West German IOC member who felt excluded by the closed and “cliquey” nature of the Organizing Committee (OC),4 an internal Foreign Office report expressed irritation at the degree of autonomy enjoyed by the organizers—namely, “foreign partners could hardly believe that the federal government had practically zero influence on the OC.”5 Despite the factual inaccuracy of this statement—Bonn, like Bavaria and Munich, had significant representation on the executive board of the OC—it captures the essence of the enterprise. For, with Daume’s vision and Vogel’s blessing, selected representatives of the architectural, design, and PR elites that had constructed...

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