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  • The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany
  • Frank Biess
The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany. By Kay Schiller and Christopher Young. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 348. Cloth $65.00. ISBN 978-0520262133.

If there are still any residual doubts among professional historians regarding the seriousness of the history of sports, this book should lay all such concerns to rest. Co written by Kay Schiller and Christopher Young, the study lives up to what it promises in the subtitle: it demonstrates how the 1972 Munich Olympics indeed constituted a formative moment in the “making of modern Germany” (or, to be more precise, its western part). As such, the book offers much more than merely a narrative of the planning, execution, and aftermath of the 1972 games. Instead, the authors place the 1972 Munich Olympics in the context of the “long 1960s” and relate their analysis of this event to a series of larger themes, such as the politics of memory, urban planning, modern design, youth cultures, the Cold War, and finally terrorism.

In their empirically rich and nuanced analysis, the authors succeed brilliantly in demonstrating how the Munich Olympics did not simply reflect these larger themes but rather “contested and constructed the spirit of the age as much as they accepted it” (225). Parallel to the analysis of the games’ larger significance, the study also brings to life some of the key individuals, most notably Willi Daume, the head of the West German National Olympic Committee; Hans-Jochen Vogel, the lord mayor of Munich during the decisive planning stage; and Avery Brundage, the idiosyncratic and aging head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The study also eschews a homogeneous notion of the West German state and differentiates carefully between the actions and interests of city officials, the Bavarian state government, and West German federal authorities. While the initiative for the games came from local and state officials, Munich’s successful bid owed much to a carefully timed increase in West German development aid for African states, which all but ensured the decisive African votes for Munich at the IOC’s 1966 meeting in Rome.

A case in point illustrating the authors’ highly differentiated analysis is the complex relationship of the Munich Olympics to their predecessor, the “Nazi Olympics” [End Page 453] of 1936 in Berlin. As the authors argue convincingly, Munich did not simply try to undo Berlin, but also drew on and engaged with its legacy in multiple ways. As the first truly modern Olympics, Berlin provided a template “in terms of organization, spectacle, and symbolic capital” (60) that Munich inadvertently replicated, including continuities of some of the organizing personnel and of symbolic practices such as the torch relay. At the same time, the Munich Olympics sought to distance themselves explicitly from Berlin, primarily through an official emphasis on “cheerful playness” (117). This attempt became especially apparent in the aesthetics of the games. In a fascinating chapter on “design, architecture, ceremony,” the authors highlight the cool, functional, and progressive design of the games, which turned Munich into a modernist Gesamtkunstwerk that contrasted markedly with the monumentalist and neoclassical pomp of its 1936 predecessor. Modernist design also constituted the centerpiece of the games’ visual communication strategy, which sought to project an image of a modern, deideologized, and future-oriented society. In similar ways, the Olympics incorporated the progressive impulses of “1968” and the student movement, while also carefully managing and defusing a more radical New Left critique of the games. For example, an “Avenue of Games” (Spielstrasse) in the Olympic Park featuring music, dance, and theater was supposed to ensure broad popular participation beyond the sports competitions. Yet the organizers made sure to exclude all too-radical and politically explicit statements from the performances, thus establishing a “basic process of accommodation, assimilation, and resistance” (141). This, the authors argue convincingly, defined the relationship between the Olympic organizers and rebellious youth more generally.

Contrary to the Olympic ideal of standing above politics, the book’s last two chapters reveal the deeply political significance of the games. At the high point of détente, the Munich games...

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