The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany

As Richard Nixon soon learned in this brief exchange with Henry Kissinger on 2 September 1972—one day after Bobby Fischer’s victory over Boris Spassky in the most famous match in chess history, and one week into the Games of the twentieth Olympiad in Munich—the relationship between sport and politics is not always easy. At best—as the president might have deduced had he reflected for a moment on the irony of Fischer’s one-man assault on the Soviet system at the height of East-West détente—it can be slippery.² At worst, as the world would be forced to conclude just days later, it can prove tragic. By 6 September, the conclusion of the Fischer-Spassky saga had been eclipsed by events in Munich, and Kissinger was pondering the etiquette of changing his plan to combine a meeting with West German government officials in the Bavarian capital with a visit to the Olympic Games.3 He had good reason to hesitate. In the early hours of 5 September, members of the Palestinian group Black September had broken into the Olympic village, shot dead two members of the Israeli Olympic team, and taken nine of their compatriots hostage in a day-long siege that turned Munich into “the cockpit of world events.”⁴ When this seismic moment of globally televised terrorism ended in a farrago of police errors that led to the death of all the Israeli captives, the bleakest day in the histories of the Olympic movement and the young Federal Republic was complete. As Chancellor Willy Brandt later recalled: “My disappointment at the time was intense [not least] because the Olympics on which we had expended so much loving care would not go down in history as a happy occasion.”⁵

Brandt’s prediction has proved all too accurate. Sports retrospectives might remind us of the athletic prowess displayed in 1972: Lasse Virén’s double in the men’s distance events; gymnast Olga Korbut (whom Nixon did soon manage to attract to the White House) “playing like a kid in the sun”;⁶ or Mark Spitz’s colossal, and until Beijing 2008, unsurpassed seven golds in the pool. But over thirty years later, the Munich Games are still dominated by their moment of nadir. Memorialization of 1972 has tended to caricature the Germans as hapless fall guys with a pantomime baddy’s past. Recent cinematic treatments such as Kevin Mac-Donald’s Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September (1999) and Steven Spielberg’s controversial Munich (2006) are but prominent cases in point.⁷ The aim of this book is to redress the balance and tell the story of Munich from the beginning rather than the end. Late in the evening of 4 September, the Olympic stadium witnessed the “romantic triumph of a slender German schoolgirl in the high jump,” a moment “that united the minds and emotions of spectators from a hundred different nations in a common celebration of unique athleticism.”⁸ Were it not for events that began just hours later, sixteen-year-old Ulrike Meyfarth’s joyous leap to victory might well have stood as a metaphor for West Germany’s successful rehabilitation on the world stage through the Olympics. This book seeks to examine the significance of those Games to the Federal Republic and explore, for the first time on the basis of extensive archival research, the “loving care” it invested in them.⁹ With the exception of a few brief essays, this topic, which sheds critical light on West German culture, politics, and society in the 1960s and the early 1970s, remains virtually unexplored.¹⁰

It hardly needs stating that the 1972 Olympics were of vital importance to West Germany. Until that point, its international representation had relied upon membership to NATO and the European Communities, as well as the usual forms of cultural diplomacy such as state visits, participation in world fairs, and specific initiatives such as the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Goethe Institute.11 By comparison, the symbolic capital on offer via the Olympic Games was immeasurable. As calculated by the organizers, it would have taken thirty-four years of filling the eighty-thousand-person-capacity Olympic Stadium on a daily basis to accumulate the number of worldwide television viewing figures for the opening ceremony alone. This same fact had not escaped the Black September terrorists who, during a pause in their negotiations on 5 September, congratulated the Germans on “produc[ing] an excellent Olympic Games,” which at the same time “offered the Palestinians a showcase where they could bring their grievance to the millions watching around the world.”¹² In bringing the Games to Munich in the first place, the West Germans had an equally urgent message to convey. A letter in 1970 from Brandt’s vice-chancellor and foreign minister, Walter Scheel, urging German embassies and consulates around the world to devote the forthcoming Olympics their utmost energies, outlined some of its main components:

More than ever before, the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich and Kiel [where the sailing events took place] will attract the attention of the world to the Federal Republic of Germany. We must be aware that other nations will be more interested in and critical of us than they have been of other countries that have hosted the Games hitherto. The memory of the Olympics in Berlin in 1936, of our historical past, and not least the awareness of our peculiar political situation will play no insignificant part in this.

IOC statutes might state that cities rather than countries host the Games, but it is on their success or lack of it that the whole country and its population is judged.

This therefore offers us the unique opportunity to use the worldwide interest in sport to draw attention to the portrayal of our development and state and to project to the rest of the world the image of a modern Germany in all its political, economic, social, and cultural facets.¹³

Bonn’s diplomats would doubtless have sensed the Olympics had more to offer still. When the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Avery Brundage, made his valedictory speech a week before the Munich event, his tour d’horizon of recent host cities provided further insights into the allure and potential of Olympic regeneration:

The Games of the XVth Olympiad in 1956 in remote Melbourne . . . represented the best investment Australia ever made. . . . Four years of positive, world-wide publicity: an enumeration of positive achievements in contrast to the reports of crime, war, political machinations and catastrophes that were disseminated in the news media, led to increased immigration and expanding tourism. The economy and industry were stimulated, and not only Australia, but the lands of the entire South Sea area were increasingly integrated into the modern world of the twentieth century. . . . Tokyo [in 1964] was able to accelerate its urban development by ten years. The city was practically newly built and will thereby always be more attractive and efficient. . . . Japan will one day reap a multiple of its investment in material and intellectual benefits. . . . [In Mexico 1968] the self-assurance of these peoples [sic] was strengthened, and particularly all Latin American countries were proud that one of them was capable of organizing this huge and expensive event just as well as the other capital cities of this world.14

Brundage, like IOC presidents before and since, might have believed his own rhetoric, but the durability and continued desirability of the Olympic brand today speaks clearly of the positive outcomes of investing in and hosting the Games. In 1972, it is clear that the Federal Republic could hope to gain much from its investment: urban regeneration, civic boosterism, increased tourism, economic development, and, of course, the chance to overlay residual images of the recent past with new narratives about the country’s political, economic, social, and cultural acumen. All in all, it was an irresistible opportunity.

The historian, however, must be cautious not to recount the West German Olympic project on such a simple storyboard or reduce it to the one-dimensionality of actor Michael Douglas’s commentary in One Day in September: “The Germans saw the Games as an opportunity to erase the negative memories many still had of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which had been used for propaganda purposes.” To a certain extent, such statements are true, but they conceal the richly textured and complex tableaux of discourses, ideas, and circumstances against which the 1972 event was developed and played out. The question of how “the Germans” saw the Games or rather which Germans saw the Games in which ways requires considerable teasing out for a start. For one, political power remained far from static in the period, the government changing twice in the six years prior to 1972—from right-liberal (CDU/CSU and FDP) via grand coalition (CDU/CSU and SPD 1966) to left-liberal (SPD and FDP 1969)—in line with the turbulent social climate of the late 1960s (“1968”). For another, the idea for hosting the Games did not originate with the federal government but with an ambitious and opportunistic alliance between two particular individuals: Willi Daume, the head of West German sport, and Hans-Jochen Vogel, the mayor of Munich. Subsequently, Bonn was not solely or even predominantly responsible for their preparation, the Organizing Committee (OC) consisting, rather, of “an unusual and unique grouping” of “the Federal Republic, the Free State of Bavaria, and the State capital Munich” on the one hand and “individual representatives of the world of sport” on the other.¹⁵ Finally, in the IOC German officials had to negotiate the traditions and peculiarities of one of the world’s most powerful but idiosyncratic international NGOs. Each of these aspects—the changing social and political climate in 1960s West Germany, the influence exercised on the Olympic project by a determined cluster of individuals, and the nature and agenda of the IOC—must be understood as essential factors in the formation of the Munich Games.

THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC IN THE 1960S: CAUGHT BETWEEN FUTURE AND PAST

As Olympic history has shown, the Games have been used from their inception in 1896 “by host nations both to celebrate an historical legacy and to aspire to the expression of their modernity.”16 In the Federal Republic of the 1960s, this dual focus on the past and the future-orientated present was writ large in debates about policy and national self-understanding. If the past had been repressed in the 1950s, the problematic legacy of Nazism lingering uncomfortably just below the surface, it returned with a vengeance in the 1960s. For whatever reasons the public and politicians let “bygones be bygones” in the first decade of the new Republic, the strategy became unworkable in the long-term. From the late 1950s onward, a complicated interplay between internal and external stimuli led to a change in attitude toward the Nazi past in West Germany. An increased internalization of this history developed because of events at home, such as the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial in 1958 (when the practice of exterminating Jews on the Eastern Front first came to public attention), the anti-Semitic wave of 1959 and 1960 (which soon encouraged ten Länder [federal states] to make the teaching of German history from 1933 to 1945 compulsory), and the first debate about the statute of limitations for Nazi crimes in 1960. Influences from abroad, such as the media drama of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961) and the continual waves of the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) destabilization campaigns, also played an important part. Just ten years after its foundation and anxious not to lose the moral high ground to its ideological rival, the Federal Republic had no option but to treat charges against its citizens with the utmost seriousness. With the clock ticking too on the (later extended) 1965 statute of limitations, war-criminals were increasingly brought to justice.

Remembering, therefore, became less “selective” in the years running up to the mid-1960s as the “burden of the past” took on ever more virulent tones in public debate. The student revolt of 1968, which projected itself as the critical interrogator of the older generation’s past, only radicalized a theme that had already been the subject of public debate for the best part of a decade. Although the eleven years from 1958 to 1969 marked the highpoint of both the public’s demand for reflection on the Nazi past and the juridical activity aimed at punishing its crimes, the 1960s remained a complex prism of perspectives. While the past increasingly featured in public debate about German identity, and its variegated forms of continuity into the present were critically examined, voices stressing German victimhood and the need to bring recent history to a close still retained their vigor. The number of those wishing to draw a line under Nazi crimes rose from 34 percent in 1958 to 67 percent in 1969—a fact exploited not only by the newly formed National Democratic Party (NPD, 1964), whose overall vote potential reached 15 percent in 1968, but also by mainstream politicians such as Franz Josef Strauß, leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU). In 1969, Strauß, who chaired the committee responsible for constructing the Olympic venues (Olympia-Baugesellschaft) for three years, felt secure enough to declare: “[A] people that has achieved such remarkable economic success has the right not to have to hear anymore about ‘Auschwitz.’ ”17 A year later, Willy Brandt’s act of penitence, when he famously fell to his knees in the Warsaw ghetto, did not meet with universal popularity in West Germany. Some 48 percent told a Spiegel poll that the chancellor had exceeded his remit, and a few weeks later an assailant protesting the presumption of Brandt’s gesture in the Polish capital punched him to the ground outside the offices of the 1972 OC in Munich.¹⁸ Leaving aside Brandt’s extraordinary good humor on this occasion and the lax security that would later mar the Games themselves, the incident aptly summarizes the attitude of West German society to the past in the 1960s.¹⁹ This was, in Detlef Siegfried’s words, “strangely ambivalent” and full of “disintegrative moments.”²⁰

By 1965, the year in which the Munich Olympic bid was conceived, a paradoxical mix of heightened sensitivity and moral ambiguity toward the past had clearly been established. The divergence—which was to increase as the decade progressed—between the views and decisions of politicians and public-opinion formers and the attitudes of the general public was also already evident. The Auschwitz trial confronted Germans for the first time with the industrial scale of the Nazis’ destruction of human life. By the time of its conclusion in August 1965, those in favor of dropping such court cases in future had risen to 57 percent (from only 15 percent four years earlier during the Eichmann trial). At the same time, however, the Bundestag voted (in March 1965) to prolong the statute of limitations on war crimes (in the first instance to 1969, for thirty years thereafter, and indefinitely in 1979), despite opposition from 60 percent of the general population. In contrast to 1960, when original calls for an extension had emanated solely from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the decision in 1965 was supported by the Free Democratic Party (FDP) as well as a significant number of Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) members of parliament. But even as mainstream politicians moved closer to each other and away from their respective publics, they would nonetheless continue to exploit the past for party-political purposes. As before in 1961, the CDU made capital in the general election of 1965 out of Willy Brandt’s wartime “desertion” of the fatherland to fight in the Norwegian resistance. In so doing, as Brandt’s advisor Egon Bahr accurately observed, they were appealing to and feeding a significant “nationalistic propensity to prejudice.”²¹

Soon, however, successive chancellors were attempting to remove the past from the public agenda. In his declaration of government in 1965, just weeks before learning of a potential bid to host the 1972 Olympics, Ludwig Erhard struck a very different chord from the campaign trail when proclaiming the “end of the post-war era.” This topos might have had “the character of an ideology that [was] invoked all the more vigorously the more evident Germany’s entanglement in the Hitler legacy [became],”22 but in the context of a de Gaulle-driven revival of nationalistic rhetoric in Europe,²³ it also represented an attempt to overcome the difficulty of establishing a national identity without recourse to a problematic past. The following year, Kurt Georg Kiesinger continued in similar vein at the head of the Grand Coalition, exhorting the nation on the Day of German Unity to turn away from history whose “teaching leaves us in the lurch.”²⁴ By the time of Kiesinger’s own declaration of government in December 1966, the focus had fully shifted toward economic success as the potential bedrock of a new German identity. Rainer Barzel, the leader of the CDU/CSU Fraktion in the Bundestag, invited the country to rejoice in its elevated status in the world ranking-lists for production, trade, and social services.²⁵ These much vaunted achievements might have provided material comfort, but they could not plaster over the ruptures in the social fabric caused by the past. By the time the SPD won power in 1969, the legacy of Nazism had come to the fore again. Although Brandt interpreted the student rebellion in his declaration of government in October 1969 as a sign of the Republic’s maturing democracy, he soon began to worry about the unwillingness of the younger generation to learn from recent history and its subsequent unreflecting flight into radicalism. At the Bundestag’s first official commemoration of the end of the Second World War on 8 May 1970, the chancellor famously noted that no German could consider themselves “free from the history they [had] inherited.”²⁶ From the conception of Munich’s Olympic bid in 1965, therefore, to the moment of the Games themselves in 1972, the past faded out before reemerging in government discourse.

At the same time, the 1960s witnessed the shoring up of a belief in the present and, more importantly, the future. From the beginning of the decade, the idea of planning or steering society lost political stigma. Increasingly, schemes such as Göring’s Four-Year Plan to make Germany fit for war or the economic models of Eastern European socialism were forgotten or ignored, as politicians and publics of every persuasion invested in the optimistic feasibility (“Machbarkeit”) of the future. Planning the future of society in general or the urban environment in particular was reinvested with positive connotations and gained support from the majority of the working class, the main political parties, and the younger functional elites: “politics no longer focused solely on the solution of problems at hand but, from the end of the 1950s, was increasingly directed toward the future; indeed the future itself became the subject of politics.”²⁷ In the 1960s, West German democracy at Land and national levels became characterized by a proliferation of plans—from the Bundesfernstraßenplan (1957) and the “Großer Hessen-Plan” (1965) to the Grand Coalition’s Economic and Stability Law of June 1967, and, in the world of sport, the Golden Plan for Health, Play, and Recreation (1960).²⁸

The Federal Republic was not alone in its desire to turn the future in its hands and shape it with present policy. In fact, as the French government’s efforts at planification in the immediate postwar era indicate, West Germany was simply catching up with its capitalist neighbors in the 1960s, its planning euphoria merely indicative of the country’s increasing “Westernization.”29 The widespread conviction that the development of society could be reliably predicted via social-scientific means was nourished specifically in the Republic by the experience of the “economic miracle” and underpinned by the belief that the domestic and global economies would continue their steady growth without major long-term shocks or crises. Despite fears of inflation in 1964 and the first recession of 1966 through 1967, West German optimism held firm throughout the 1960s and remained intact until the first dramatic hike in oil prices of 1973.

This common optimism went hand in hand with an increasing conviction, particularly among social-democrat and liberal politicians, that ideological struggle had had its day. Not only had the country’s two main parties drawn closer after the SPD shed most of its Marxist heritage at the Bad Godesberg conference of 1959, but the “end of ideology” was also perceived in an apparent diminishing of differences between the two Germanys.³⁰ The fact that East and West had managed to sustain comparatively rapid economic growth while financing expanding welfare states even raised hopes that the two systems were set to converge. Such beliefs began to ease the “German question” into a new dimension and would eventually frame the changing attitudes of the Federal Republic’s political elites toward the GDR’s unqualified participation in the Munich Games. The motor behind intra-German détente—articulated in Brandt’s “Two states—One nation” theory and culminating in the Ostpolitik treaties with the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the GDR from 1970 to 1972—presumed a new understanding of the state that severed its link with the concept of nation: “The state was no longer an ‘ethical idea’ in the Hegelian sense, but a modern organization which had to adapt and transform according to new requirements and demands.”³¹

This sense of modern organization—a reaching for the future while addressing the issues of the day head-on—set the climate in which a West German bid for the Olympics could be conceived and, indeed, flourish. Paradoxically, while the past increasingly dominated public discourse in the 1960s, it was the Republic’s future-orientation that gave the Olympic project its essential pulse. When planning ahead for 1972, technocratic optimism, economic growth, and the “end of ideology” each played a vital role.

KEY INDIVIDUALS: WILLI DAUME
AND HANS-JOCHEN VOGEL

Yet crucially, there would have been no West German Olympics at all, were it not for two individuals who met for the first time when one walked into the other’s office looking, at the eleventh hour, for a potential city to host the next Olympics but one. When Willi Daume arrived at Munich City Hall on 28 October 1965, he was eager to ride a brief wave of international sympathy that had gathered behind the Federal Republic after a crushing political defeat at the IOC over the controversial status of the GDR (see chapter 6). In Hans-Jochen Vogel, he encountered a politician equally keen to seize the moment of improbable opportunity. Ambitious and opportunistic in equal measure, Daume and Vogel formed a perfect team and went on to exert a formidable influence on the shape of the 1972 Games. Any analysis of West Germany’s Olympic project would be inaccurate if it neglected the crucial role of central individuals and their respective worldviews. The form and content of the Games often owe as much to individual visions, passions, and convictions as they do to local and national circumstances, and Munich was no exception. In 1972, a somewhat unlikely pairing came together at an auspiciously productive moment in the nation’s history.

Both men were firmly established in their respective spheres and appeared to be riding an upward curve. Daume had served as president of the Deutscher Sport Bund (DSB, German Sports Association) since 1950 and in 1961 had secured an unassailable position as “head of German sport” when he was elected simultaneously to the presidency of the National Olympic Committee for Germany.³² A recipient of the Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz (Great Cross of Merit) in 1959, he was held in equal esteem internationally. A member of the IOC from 1956, he was elected its vice president on the eve of the Munich Games in August 1972 and later headed its important admission committee (Commission d’Admission).³³ Reputed to have enjoyed great credibility among the athletes themselves,³⁴ he was later voted “Sports Personality of the Twentieth Century” by the German press.³⁵

Vogel was no less dynamic. A talented lawyer, he had become, at the age of thirty-four, the youngest mayor of any European metropolis in the 1960 Munich city elections. Nearly forty years younger than his predecessor and running under the campaign slogan of “Munich of Tomorrow,” he secured some 63.4 per cent of the vote for the SPD. Given this clear “breakthrough for the younger generation,” there is probably some truth to his claim that the Munich victory encouraged Brandt to stand against the elderly Adenauer in the 1961 general election.³⁶ After his spell in Munich, Vogel would spend twenty-two years at ministerial level in Land and national governments, most famously as minister for justice during the “German Autumn” of 1977, when he steered debates away from a possible reintroduction of the death penalty for kidnappers, and later as leader and chairman of the SPD (1983–1991 and 1987–1991 respectively).

Despite conspicuous successes, both men were to miss out on the office that would have crowned their careers. Daume—against an increasing “Latinization” of world sports’ hierarchies in the 1970s and early 1980s³⁷—harbored hopes of becoming the IOC president, until the West German boycott of the Moscow Olympics ruined his chances in the election year of 1980.³⁸ In the same period, Vogel suffered high-profile defeats, losing first as governing mayor of Berlin to the CDU’s Richard von Weizsäcker in 1981 and then to Helmut Kohl in the 1983 general election. In the 1960s and early 1970s, however, Daume and Vogel were enjoying both their best times and an aura of those destined for even greater things. One was the “Bundeskanzler des Deutschen Sports” (Chancellor of German sport),³⁹ the other the “Karajan der Kommunalpolitik” (Karajan of local politics).⁴⁰

Born thirteen years earlier, Daume’s relation to the past was more complex than Vogel’s. Having played team handball at the highest level (in the Gauklasse with Eintracht Frankfurt from 1934 and once for the national team in 1938) and attended the Olympics both as a spectator (1928 and 1932) and a participating athlete (1936), his later memories of dealing with the Nazis tended to focus on sport and its self-projection as a realm apart, even under threat, from the regime. Reminiscing on the closing ceremony of the Los Angeles Olympics of 1932, for instance, he would recall an “unforgettable melancholy” born of a feeling that “something [was] coming to an end in Germany that would never return. Economic calamity, the Nazis ante portas.”⁴⁷ His image of the Berlin Games—during which he was removed from the gold-medal-winning team handball squad to join a makeshift basketball team, a sport massively popular in the United States but virtually unknown in Germany—drew from a similar emotional stock: “Athletes who were as active in sport as I was and were competitive sportsmen were all critical. But we avoided the issue more than anything, and sport was a way of doing that.”⁴⁸

Nevertheless, as recent research has shown, Daume’s past was less clear-cut than he portrayed. A prosperous, middle-ranking industrialist who took over the family’s Dortmund iron foundries on the death of his father in 1938, Daume had joined the party in May 1937.⁴⁹ After a brief spell in the army, he was granted a uk-Stellung (i.e., classified as indispensable in his civilian job) because of the importance of his factory for the manufacture of tank parts. Much of the war was spent overseeing a company branch in Belgium, where—as he later claimed—under the threat of deportation to the Stalingrad front he wrote spying reports for the SS Security Service of such dubious quality that he was finally left in peace.⁵⁰ Be this as it may, like Vogel and countless other Germans, Daume had “looked away.” In April 1942, one thousand Jews were held for several days in the sports hall of his local club, TV Eintracht Dortmund, which was under his supervision, before being transported to Zamo near Lublin, a holding point for the death camp at Belzec. In 1944, sixty-five forced laborers kept production at his factory going.51 In the early 1940s he had also penned articles in TV Eintracht’s club magazine and NS-Sport that were infused with “a militaristic understanding of sport charged with [nationalistic] pathos.”⁵² Nonetheless, as the paucity of documentary evidence gathered against him after the war and the fact that the Stasi’s collaboration with the KGB to find incriminating material against him proved so unsuccessful clearly shows, in the grand scheme of things, Daume was a negligible figure in Nazi Germany.⁵³ Like the majority of his generation, he benefited from his marginality before 1945 and the new Republic’s willful amnesia in the 1950s.

To varying degrees, therefore, Daume and Vogel had both flirted with Nazism but avoided serious indictment. In 1945 Daume, who had begun rising through the ranks as a sports functionary under the National Socialists, found himself in the right place at the right time. At the age of thirty-two, he had a young and apparently uncompromised face that fitted the needs of the moment. With the politically and confessionally divided landscape of pre-1933 sport providing little traction to postwar German needs, the organizational tabula rasa offered considerable opportunity for self-advancement. Under the watchful eye of the Allies, the emphasis in the second half of the 1940s fell heavily on regional and federal development. Much the same as over the previous decade, Daume used the luxury of time and administrative facilities afforded him by a prospering but not over-burdensome business life to maximize his political advantage.⁵⁴ Continuing at a local level with almost no interruption, he fostered good contacts with the Allies and became chair of the West German handball association in 1947. Soon, there was scarcely a regional or supraregional committee on which he did not sit, and by the end of the decade he had become both vice president of the new-guard Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Sportämter (ADS, Consortium of German Sports Offices), a forerunner of the DSB, and treasurer of the old-guard National Olympic Committee (NOC)—two rival factions eager to secure complete control of West German sport. In the event, Daume’s interpersonal and negotiating skills saw him elected as the first president of the DSB in 1950—a compromise candidate who was soon to make the post and German sport his own. Aged thirty-seven, he had been placed in charge of an association of some four million members, the largest German “Volksbewegung” since the demise of the Nazi Party.⁵⁵

The ability to straddle rival factions, make the right move, and assert one’s will against the grain of competition and expectation was a skill that Daume shared with his Munich partner, Hans-Jochen Vogel. Vogel, who came from an educated middle-class family of professors, civil servants, and judges that stretched back several generations, and who had also worked in the Bavarian state chancellery, would have been a natural candidate for membership of the CDU/CSU, like his younger brother, Bernhard, a future CDU minister-president.⁵⁶ On finding no welcome in the party, however, he joined the SPD—a socially counterintuitive move that he nonetheless carried off with considerable aplomb. He “conducted himself in the artistic circles of Schwabing and public meetings with equal aplomb”;57 practiced the folksy beer-barrel tapping (Bieranstich) that officially opened the Oktoberfest with a Braumeister until he had it off to a tee; and later became the first middle-class, Bavarian, and practicing Catholic chairman of the SPD.⁵⁸ Daume and Vogel might have been opportunists, but their careers were cemented on a reputation for forthrightness and trustworthiness.⁵⁹ It was doubtless this combination that made two men pursuing great things—Daume, the world’s greatest sporting event, Vogel, the transformation of his city—into ideal partners.

As Vogel later recalled, there were differences of style and opinion, but these did not prevent the two from developing an excellent working relationship.⁶⁰ This close and—as the historical record of many hundreds of letters and meetings over six years shows—largely harmonious cooperation was founded on a productive mix of opposite but complementary skill-sets and similar, if not identical, core beliefs. Daume was renowned for his exuberant generosity, flights of fancy, and visionary qualities;⁶¹ Vogel, by contrast, for technocratic sobriety, studied parsimony, and exactitude to the point of pedantry.⁶² If Vogel’s “computer-brain stored data, people, meetings, and events more precisely than almost anyone else could have,”⁶³ Daume—as his partner would remember—regarded the organizational detail of the Games with “bewilderment.” While Vogel kept his eyes firmly on the bottom line, Daume produced results “which an administrative expert would have considered completely impossible.”⁶⁴ Both men were driven by a strong work ethic fuelled by an awareness of the responsibility placed upon them to improve society.⁶⁵ A member of the CDU, Daume’s worldview was marked by enlightened-liberal, civil-society thinking. Tolerant and international, he held to a basic Christian-humanist orientation and was conscious of the need to develop new structures within the young Republic.⁶⁶ As a vital facet of democracy, sport equated to fairness, community, and freedom of choice.⁶⁷ Christianity and social justice formed the archimedic point of Vogel’s personal convictions too.⁶⁸ An admirer of Wilhelm Hoegner—the SPD’s Bavarian leader whose speech on the relicensing of the party in November 1945 arguably foreshadowed its seminal Godesberg reforms fourteen years later—he bristled with the “common cause of humanity regardless of religious, national or class differences,” notions of “human dignity,” “freedom,” “justice and . . . solidarity” and believed “passionately” that “every individual, be they the poorest, had the right to expect some modest good fortune in life.”⁶⁹

For all their differences, Vogel and Daume—two men from moderately conservative backgrounds motivated by moderately progressive convictions—shared enough common ground to form a cohesive unit with a firm will to succeed. Their respective talents as visionary and ruthless pragmatist made them the ideal composite for the “short summer of concrete utopia” that looked to the future with a belief in progress by technocratic means.70 And when it came to persuading the federal government to back the bid, steering their Games through innumerable committees and dealing with the IOC, they knew what had to be done and formed their own Grand Coalition.

THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE

Vogel, Daume, and the Federal Republic would need to be resourceful, since in the IOC they were engaging not only with “one of the world’s greatest institutions” but one that believed its own hype, clung to traditions, and behaved on occasion with the random unaccountability of a self-electing gentlemen’s club.⁷¹ As a West German Foreign Office official witheringly observed on his return from Lausanne in 1969: “The general impression one gets of this IOC conference is of scant organization teetering constantly on the brink of disaster. The IOC consists for the most part of old and very old men, whose independence borders on the unmanageable.”⁷² The committee’s dysfunctional workings were matched by an increasingly outmoded set of principles. Even in the 1960s it was still largely imbued by the ethos of its founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937), who had conceived the Games as part of a broad program of educational reform in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War.⁷³ An enlightened reactionary, who embraced the nascent peace movement, de Coubertin developed a set of ideals that shared core values with analogous idealistic and international movements of the time such as Scouting (1908), Esperanto (1887), and the Red Cross (1863).⁷⁴ Each of these was characterized by a rhetoric of universal membership, “an insistence on political neutrality,” “a professed interest in peacemaking or pacifism,” “a complex and problematic relationship between national and international loyalties,” and “the emergence of a (marginalized) ‘citizen-of-the-world’ style radical supranationalism.”⁷⁵ Olympism, in particular, sought to transfer the mood and feel of religion, which had lost its function in the modern world, to the domain of sport and aimed to resynthesize body and mind via competitions in music, literature, art, and design. It revered the body as a locus of moral endeavor in the midst of the atrophy and decadence of modern industrial society and maintained the purity of its participants by insisting on their amateur status.⁷⁶

Despite its fin-de-siècle creed, Olympism proved highly durable and thrived in the twentieth century despite the disruption of two world wars. Governed by a code of such “obvious and banal character” that it found “eager subscribers of every political stripe,” the IOC preached universalism, practiced maximum inclusiveness and resolutely refused to become ensnared in world events beyond its control.⁷⁷ De Coubertin and his successors had been proselytizingly ambitious about the movement’s global reach and clearly willing to make concessions. While the founder’s early writings concerned themselves primarily with the ideals of the Games, his later output focused increasingly on how to preserve their existence irrespective of “ideological cleavage.”78 In an interview given after the 1936 Games in Berlin, he asked provocatively: “What’s the difference between propaganda for tourism—like in the Los Angeles Olympics of 1932—or for a political regime? The most important thing is that the Olympic movement made a successful step forward.”⁷⁹ Doubtless de Coubertin would have applauded the irate sentiments of the IOC when several teams withdrew from the 1956 Melbourne Olympics over the Suez crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. As Brundage still maintained in 1972: “The Olympic Games are competitions between individual athletes, and not between nations. . . . In the imperfect world in which we live, precious few international competitions would take place if the participation in sporting events were interrupted every time politicians offend against the laws of humanity.”⁸⁰ Yet despite such ideals, the movement became increasingly entwined with politics and politicization as the twentieth century progressed: the more political agencies provided the necessary financial and institutional support needed to stage the Games, the harder it became for the IOC to maintain its independence.

In the 1960s, however, politicization was but one of the problems facing the IOC as the world changed and fresh generations of sports functionaries from new nations and ideological alliances began to find their voice. The rise of decolonized nations in Africa led to threats of boycott over the participation of Rhodesia and South Africa; organizers of ambitious regional games flexed their muscles; and the Soviets backed calls for the creation of a transparent IOC parliament to replace the restrictive, self-electing model that had maintained IOC continuities from its inception. The international sports federations had become restless too, demanding fairer representation and annual consultation; athletes and organizers of sports events found it difficult to adhere to the committee’s Victorian code of amateurism and anticommercialism; and the metropolises of Rome (1960) and Tokyo (1964) had taken such a shine to their Olympic projects that many feared the Games’ recent “gigantism” would, if unchecked, damage their ethic and aesthetic beyond repair.⁸¹ In short, the IOC was under siege on more fronts than perhaps at any other point in its history. The organization might well have benefited from a forward-looking tactician at the helm, such as Willi Daume. Although somewhat swept along by the “economic miracle” and the technocratic optimism of the 1960s—predicting once, for instance, that in the age of space travel scientists would democratize winter sports by inventing year-round ice—Daume was imbued with a deep sense of realism and responsibility for sport’s role in a changing world. For Daume (with unmistakable echoes of de Coubertin), sport had a vital part to play in easing the mental and physical woes of society, a task it would fulfill, critically, only by focusing on the future.⁸² In Avery Brundage, however, the IOC was run by a president who still believed in the Olympics as a modern religion, “the like of which,” he claimed in 1967, had “never happened before.”83 As the modernization and professionalization of sport continued apace after the Second World War, Brundage unrepentantly turned his face to the past, seeking to “arrest the decline and to restore and preserve Olympic ideals” before “promoters and the politicians” caused it to “disintegrate and collapse entirely.”⁸⁴

Brundage was powerful. Coming from a poor background, success in the Chicago construction industry had eased his passage into the higher echelons of the Olympic movement. As president of the U.S. Olympic Committee (1923–53), then vice president (1945–52) and president (1952–1972) of the IOC, he was an uncritical, even fanatical follower of de Coubertin’s ideas. An isolationist by early political conviction—he chaired the Citizens’ Keep America Out of the War Committee—his Olympic heritage also, paradoxically, made him an internationalist. Like de Coubertin, ethics played little part in his outlook. Rather, his behavior was dictated by a rigid cultural code based on an uncompromising understanding of the founder’s principles. In word and deed, Brundage “never understood . . . the profound vulgarity of applying the Olympic outlook to every situation he encountered.”⁸⁵ Most famously, this attitude caused international outrage at the memorial service held in Munich’s Olympic Stadium the day after the terrorist attack, when any admiration for his impassioned dictum that “the Games must go on!” quickly evaporated over his claim that the Olympics had been the victim of “two great attacks”—the other coming from the enforced expulsion of Rhodesia after the African nations threatened to boycott. Both sentiments originated from a blind adherence to the notion of the Games’ sacred autonomy. To Brundage—and in 1972, as the IOC’s hastily issued apology against their departing president’s wishes show, to Brundage alone—killing Israelis and being pressured to expel a team of any political hue were one and the same affront.

Such obsession with the letter of Olympic law has been cited as one of the motivations behind Brundage’s behavior in 1935 and 1936, when, as president of both the U.S. Amateur Athletics Union and Olympic Committee, he derailed the famous Jewish-led campaign to boycott the 1936 Games. Playing the noninterventionist card and drawing on the widespread belief among U.S. sports functionaries of the interwar years that “sport, American style, could transform other ideologies and social systems,”⁸⁶ Brundage returned from Berlin insisting claims about Nazi anti-Semitism were massively exaggerated.⁸⁷ In Germany, he had been chaperoned by IOC member Karl Ritter von Halt, with whom he had maintained a close friendship since the two competed in the decathlon at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. His role in keeping the United States in the 1936 Games was duly rewarded with a seat on the IOC at the expense of fellow American and pro-boycott member Lee Jahncke.⁸⁸ Sports-political convictions, the willingness to show good will, and the desire to progress within elite networks serve only in part, however, to explain Brundage’s actions. Of equal importance was a visceral anti-Semitism that surfaced no later than the 1930s and recurred throughout his life.89 In a speech to the German-American Bund at Madison Square Garden in October 1936, he exhorted his listeners to learn from Germany on how to eradicate the risk of communism.⁹⁰ Brundage would become a world-establishment figure in the decades following the war, but his dubious proclivities were known to some West Germans, at least, in the 1960s. In an interview given shortly before his death in 1996, Daume revealed that he had been in little doubt as to the president’s political preferences: “He was a Nazi, of course. Some say he would have founded a Nazi party in the U.S.A. I visited him once around that time. At one point, there was a knock on the door, and it opened and there was a real SS-man in a brown uniform with a swastika and armband wanting to collect. He actually supported it all. . . . And—I have to laugh—he showed me all these anti-Jewish newspapers from all over the world, which he loved, it was very odd.”⁹¹

Daume’s recollections were doubtless conflated but they reveal that the Munich OC president was aware of the general drift of the American’s views. Certainly, as he also remembered, Brundage ensured that no Jew was ever elected to the IOC despite a range of good candidates during his presidency, and that Jewish descent hampered applicants’ chances of gaining even relatively minor posts within the organization.⁹² His disdain for Jews was matched only by his admiration for Germany. In 1973 he fulfilled his ambition to marry a German princess and lived out his latter days within walking distance of the site of the 1936 Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen.⁹³ Such Germanophilia would have advantages and disadvantages for the Munich organizers. The fair wind of presidential approval would be cancelled out by his passion to achieve German reunification via sport, an unrealistic but tenaciously pursued ambition that often ran contrary to the mood and policy of the federal government. At the same time, the precarious position in which the president found himself as opposing forces gathered momentum made him vulnerable to self-serving political intrigue. He became a “fellow traveler” with an attraction to strong leaders, especially when they produced, as in the Eastern bloc, magnificent sports displays. As the 1960s wore on, Brundage became a brittle ally and the IOC a tricky forum to read.⁹⁴

GERMANY AND THE IOC

Such are the parameters within which host cities, at least since the 1930s (see chapter 3), have agreed to play. The Munich organizers were no exception and, as we shall see throughout this book, were often involved in intricate and irritating negotiations with the IOC over matters of taste, vision, and diplomacy. What is intriguing about the 1972 event, however, is the extent to which West Germany’s organizing team staked its claim as an active participant in the Olympic movement, setting itself up as its self-proclaimed savior in its period of greatest turmoil. Time and again, Daume would return to this theme, stressing both the extraordinary trust the IOC placed in Germany and Germany’s responsibility to renew the Games for the present day.⁹⁵ Admittedly, the archive shows little trace of either the federal government or Munich obsessing over the state of the Olympic movement, but Daume’s convictions and all-encompassing energy meant that his perception of the nation’s function within a larger Olympic narrative would have a significant impact on the eventual shape of the event. If the “Schicksalsspiele” (threshold Games) of Munich sought to portray a modern Germany, they were equally concerned, in the mind of their chief organizer at least, with giving the Olympics “a new self-understanding.”⁹⁶

This bifocal approach to the Games fits neatly with a general practice in cultural diplomacy, in which—as Johannes Paulmann has shown—West Germany differed markedly from other European states. Unlike its counterparts, which after 1945 continued to rely on nineteenth-century techniques of cultural export for self-representation abroad, the Federal Republic placed its emphasis intellectually and materially on exchange and dialogue.⁹⁷ Daume’s dual commitment to the national and the international was, therefore, very much in keeping with Bonn’s cultural program. More importantly, however, he was influenced by a deep-rooted historical relationship—on personal, institutional, and ideological levels—between German Olympians and the IOC. The 1972 event was affected by Daume’s close friendship with Avery Brundage and the insipid but pervasive legacy of what we shall term the “German Olympic imagination.”

Despite some differences on matters of principle (see chapter 2), Daume stood firmly in the IOC president’s corner. By the mid-1960s, they had been acquainted for some thirty years, having met at the 1936 Games and again at close quarters when Brundage lodged with the Daumes in Dortmund shortly after war. While recognizing the president’s overt Nazi tendencies in one breath, Daume would admire his grand stature in the next. “He was a great man,” he enthused toward the end of his life: “He was the kind of American who made that country great, a pioneer type.”⁹⁸ Daume, the middle-class, middle-ranking industrialist from the Ruhr was in awe of the Chicago tycoon and reveled in his company and the glamorous world of the IOC.⁹⁹ On the invitation of U.S. President Johnson, he flew to Brundage’s eightieth birthday celebrations in 1967, Alt-Nymphenburger porcelain under his arm and a telegram of congratulation from President Lübke in the post.¹⁰⁰ When it came to hosting the pampered IOC, nothing was good enough: in 1963, secretary Otto Mayer had to plead with him to curb his spending as he prepared to welcome its session (an annual meeting which dovetailed with the Olympics every four years and took place at other times in different cities around the world) to Baden-Baden.¹⁰¹ Such munificence would later lead to problems with the Munich city representatives on the 1972 OC, for whom the clash of economic cultures (such as an estimated accommodation bill of three million deutschmarks from the Vier Jahreszeiten and Sheraton hotels) sometimes proved too hard to stomach.¹⁰²

Much of Daume’s determination to regenerate and indeed perfect the Olympic event was fuelled by his obvious pleasure in being a member of an exclusive club. But his passion also stemmed from a long-held devotion to its aims and principles among German sports functionaries in general. The Olympics of the modern era might have been invented by a Frenchman, modeled on English sporting ideals, and celebrated for the first time in their ancient home in Greece, but no other country in Europe took to the Games with such philosophical zeal as Germany. This enthusiasm was buoyed by and displayed certain affinities to the country’s deep-seated philhellenism, but did not, crucially, depend on it. In the first instance, the Olympics became popular in Germany because they represented the de facto world championships of a form of bodily culture, modern sport, that found itself in ideological struggle with an indigenous counterpart, gymnastics (Turnen). The arrival of sport from Britain in the years between the foundation of the Reich in 1871 and the First World War pitted two different forms of citizenship against each other: the newcomer offering the inherent competition of the industrial age as an alternative to the incumbent’s collective mentality and top-down institutional structures. The innate modernity of the import found a natural home in burgeoning urban centers, where it offered alternative loci of sociability and, eventually, mobility for the new service professions such as engineering, sales, and journalism.103 When sport made the dramatic leap in spectatorship and participation in the interwar years that established it as one of the cultural phenomena of the twentieth century, its rise was all the more bitterly contested by the Turner, who frequently condemned the Olympic Games as a pursuit unworthy of German patriots. Within the institutional memory of German sport, therefore, the Olympics became both a cherished ideal and a national preoccupation.

Most of this tradition drew breath from one man, Carl Diem, whose influence spanned the twentieth century until his death in the early 1960s. Born into humble circumstances, Diem latched onto the new phenomenon of sport as a form of social advancement at the end of the nineteenth century.¹⁰⁴ By the age of twenty he had become secretary of the Deutsche Sportbehörde für Athletik (1903, German Sports Authority for Athletics), and as a journalist traveled to the intercalendric Games in Athens in 1906. Appointed general secretary of the aborted Berlin Olympics of 1916, he rose to the rank of general secretary of the Reichsausschuß für Leibesübungen (Reich Committee for Physical Education) in 1917, helped found the first sports university in the world (Hochschule für Leibesübungen, College for Physical Education) in Berlin in 1920 and, finally, organized the Games of 1936. After the war, he founded the Deutsche Sporthochschule in Cologne in 1947, where he became rector a year later and established himself as the éminence grise of West German sport. At one remove from the real center of power, now occupied by the young Daume, Diem was nonetheless instrumental in formulating central facets of the Federal Republic’s sports landscape (e.g., Deutsches Sportabzeichen, Bundesju-gendspiele, Deutsche Olympische Gesellschaft).

Despite hefty debate in recent years, the nature of Diem’s relation to National Socialism is still unclear.¹⁰⁵ While this is not the place to rehearse well-worn arguments, it would be fair to conclude that Diem, like many of those who worked with him, entered into serious compromises with the regime. Certainly his will requested the burning of all but family correspondence after his death, and the sentiments of his wife, Liselott, who confided these final wishes to Daume, succinctly articulate a life of moral dilemma: “He had to go along with some things, which, deep down, he really didn’t like.”¹⁰⁶ In the mid-1960s, though, Diem’s reputation had not yet been exposed to the serious revisions that tainted it in later decades. Immediately after the war, Adenauer and his ministers realized his global connections represented the best chance of expedient reintegration into the conservative world of Olympic (and by extension, therefore, international) sport and were happy to bless a continuity at national level that ensured his survival.

Diem’s writings and persona meshed into an “Olympic imagination” that characterized the way in which a certain group of West Germans conceived of the Olympic movement and its Games. This particularly German inflection of Olympism consisted of an uncritical appreciation of the 1936 Games (see chapter 3) and a strong emphasis on the country’s long-standing archaeological contribution to Olympic legacy. After Ernst Curtius’s original expedition to Olympia in the nineteenth century, the site underwent two further excavations, from 1936 to 1943 and in 1961 when the DSB, Deutsche Olympische Gesellschaft (DOG, German Olympic Society), and the West German NOC financed its final clearance. In their enthusiasm for the sacred home of the ancient Games, West German sports functionaries recounted narratives of national philanthropy which glossed over basic historical facts. The fifty thousand reichsmarks appropriated from Hitler’s personal disposition fund to finance the second dig were conveniently forgotten, as were the Nazis’ counterintuitive idea of using the ancient location to commemorate the Games of 1936 and the endeavors of Walter Wrede, the highest ranking member of the NSDAP in Greece, to unearth “new Reich exemplary warriors, unnamed heroes of state [and] Aryan strongmen masquerading as Olympic athletes.”¹¹² In 1961, under Diem’s direction, the West Germans lorded it over the Greeks when “handing Olympia back” after the final dig and moving the casket containing de Coubertin’s heart from one part of the site to another. Throughout the 1960s, they embellished their worldview with institutions such as the Internationale Olympische Akademie (IOA, International Olympic Academy) in Olympia, which—in a manner chiming with Germany’s archaeological guardianship of Greek culture—was founded and run under German auspices (until the Greek military dictatorship removed Prince George of Hannover from the directorship in 1969).¹¹³

These were the complicated, overlapping discourses within, around, and away from which the Munich project would unfold over the six years between 1966 and 1972: a political climate that would experience three different governments, social turmoil, and a radical change of policy toward the Eastern bloc; an international NGO buffeted by internal strife, political interference, and institutional intrigue; and an indigenous concept of Olympism that clung to outmoded notions of the classical inheritance and an unfashionable veneration of the 1936 Games. Within and without these coordinates, the Federal Republic, the city of Munich, and the representatives of the West German sports world were faced with the multiple tasks of presenting the world with a new Germany, envisioning and accelerating dramatic urban development, and making the Olympics speak to a new generation. All the while, they would be oscillating between the two conceptual constants that characterize every Olympic Games: historical legacies and visions of modernity.

1

Introduction

THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC IN THE 1960S: CAUGHT BETWEEN FUTURE AND PAST

KEY INDIVIDUALS: WILLI DAUMEAND HANS-JOCHEN VOGEL

THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE

GERMANY AND THE IOC

KEY INDIVIDUALS: WILLI DAUME
AND HANS-JOCHEN VOGEL