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3. The Legacy of Berlin 1936 and the German Past: Problems and Possibilities
- University of California Press
- Chapter
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The Legacy of Berlin and the German Past Problems and Possibilities Munich’s hosting of the Olympics fitted the geopolitical pattern of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) decisions after the Second World War, which had gradually ushered the defeated nations back to the heart of the international family. The first three Games after went to the victors and (semi)neutrals (London , Helsinki , Melbourne ), with three of the following four heading to the losers (Rome , Tokyo , and Munich ). In Rome and Tokyo, the Olympics allowed the hosts to puff out their chest and present a new and forward-looking image. For the Federal Republic, the potential was similar but at the same time very different. Not only did Germany occupy a special place in the opprobrium of world opinion but, unlike Italy or Japan, it had hosted the Games before. Whereas the Italians provided a touchstone with antiquity and the technologically innovative Japanese facilitated the event’s expansion into Asia, the Germans were welcoming the Games back after an absence of only thirty-six years. Berlin had been “the most controversial Games ever” and, not surprisingly , Munich’s relation to them was complicated.1 In the week of the opening ceremony, the opinion-forming magazine Spiegel launched a brutal salvo at the Olympic movement and its hosts.2 In a report entitled “Ein Geschenk der Deutschen an sich selbst” (A Present from the Germans to Themselves), it paraded a litany of contemporary crises, attacking the politicization of sport (the African boycott threat), the sham of amateurism, the privileging of high performance over massed participation, and the spiraling cost of the event and the “Münchhausen economics” of its defenders. Happy to feed the organizers’ greed for money but too lazy to protest against “hypocritical Olympic ideals,” the Spiegel concluded acerbically, the German public was about to be served the Games it deserved. In all of this, Berlin was relegated to a subclause, but the inference was clear: Munich had much in common with its predecessor. Quotations from Otto Szymiczek—the German Curator of the International Olympic Academy and significant guardian of the German “Olympic imagination”—appeared in sarcastic montage, and the Games’ potential to improve the nation’s image was undermined by juxtaposing Munich’s “frothy advertising” with what the magazine saw as a real need for “credible, stable policies.” The magazine might have avoided a direct verbal comparison of the two Games—a common platitude of the GDR (see chapter )—but was more than comfortable citing the image of to deliver a negative verdict on modern sport and national attitudes. In the center of the article, its insinuations were lent visual weight by a large picture of the opening ceremony in , swastika prominent, and a caption reading “Olympic Games in Berlin : perjury and monumentalism.” This dissonance between image and words in the Spiegel was symptomatic of a broader public unease with the memory of . The reissuing in of a cigarette card album from the Games by the Frankfurt publisher März caused the most notable stir. Under the title Die Nazi-Olympiade, the press printed the original images alongside a scathing epilogue by Gerhard Zwerenz, a regular contributor to the radical left-wing magazine Konkret.3 As one reviewer astutely noted, the publication relied on an unresolved tension between its attractive visual material and flimsy verbal critique. Egon Franke, federal minister of Intra-German Relations , had little doubt about the publisher’s cynical commercial intent, lamenting to its head, Jörg Schröder, how it was already apparently possible “to glorify the darkest times of our nation again.” Schröder’s reply in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung—“Obviously the Minister is only capable of grasping the critical nature of books if he sees the words ‘critical analysis’ in the title”—might have been a superlative rhetorical parry, but it masked the ambivalent position that occupied for the majority of the album’s readers.4 In , the relatively recent Berlin Games were still highly valued by sports enthusiasts as an outstanding athletic spectacle.5 Whether, beyond that, they were fascinated by the “schöner Schein” (beautiful semblance) of the Third Reich (Reichel), convinced by the political critique of it, or moved at the same time by both—is impossible to tell. At any rate, in there were contesting views of , which could swirl and fall across a broad spectrum of opinion. Much depended on the discourse within which such opinion was expressed—the “German Olympic imagination,” the critical left-wing...
