The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany

This dissonance between image and words in the Spiegel was symptomatic of a broader public unease with the memory of 1936. The reissuing in 1972 of a cigarette card album from the 1936 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 1936 occupied for the majority of the album’s readers.⁴ In 1972, 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 1972 there were contesting views of 1936, 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 press, the “innocent” pleasure of sports fandom—and Berlin could be viewed simultaneously from different angles. Moreover, the nature of the Olympics, an event that drew its lifeblood from tradition, made it impossible to ignore the legacy of 1936. The Munich Games, therefore, offer a potent example of what Friedrich Kießling recently described as the major dilemma of postwar German representation: “on the one hand, the desire for recognition and acceptance again in the international community and at the same time, on the other, the search for a suitable way of engaging with the National Socialist past.”6 For the Organizing Committee (OC), winning, planning, and executing the Games for the IOC and the young Federal Republic involved a series of problems, contradictions, and opportunities.

THE IOC AND 1936

Today, the IOC’s website reflects the widely held (and particularly Anglo-American) view that 1936 represented the nadir of Olympic history.⁷ However, such notions airbrush the committee’s own changing relation to the Berlin event over time and reduce a complex bundle of influences and perspectives to a moral shorthand. In point of fact, although initially worried about Hitler’s designs on the Olympics, the IOC seemed enraptured with Germany’s contribution to the movement. Famously, Leni Riefenstahl was awarded the Olympic Diploma in 1937 for her film Olympia and the Nazi leisure organization “Strength through Joy” (Kraft durch Freude) won the Pierre de Coubertin Cup in 1938. In 1937, Carl Diem was allowed to establish an International Olympic Institute in Berlin, and General Walter von Reichenau—a convinced National Socialist member of the 1936 organizing committee, later Reichssportführer and eager military leader on the Eastern Front—was readily accepted as an IOC member. When Sapporo withdrew from hosting the 1940 Winter Olympics because of the onset of war, the event was switched back to its 1936 venue, Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

Scholarship has often criticized the IOC, specifically in this period. Certainly the committee’s natural right-wing leanings can hardly be denied.⁸ Not only did a number of its members come from countries (Italy, Germany, Spain) whose governments and sports organizations had lurched definitively to the right, but, as aristocrats and businessmen, both they and their Anglo-American counterparts viewed communism, and the Soviet Union in particular, as a serious threat. The personal convictions of some members also harmonized, to differing degrees, with Nazi viewpoints. Feeling undervalued by his native France, the aging de Coubertin let himself be wooed and manipulated by the Nazi regime. Focusing on apparent philosophical affinities (e.g., the body as moral regenerator), he publicly endorsed the 1936 Games and, in the last years of his life, was saved from penury by Nazi funds channeled through Carl Diem.⁹ Other prominent Olympians showed even clearer signs of ideological weakness. Henri de Baillet-Latour, IOC president during the Berlin Games (1925–42), was not “very fond of Jews,” and his vice president and successor (1946–52), Sigfrid Edström, expressed a “hearty hatred” of those in the United States who publicly opposed the 1936 event.¹⁰ An engineer from Gothenburg, Edström was a Germanophile who spoke the language fluently, visited the country frequently on business, and argued strongly for the readmission of the Federal Republic to the IOC after the war. In such company Avery Brundage looked very much at home.

Yet the emphasis these facts are typically given has often skewed the narrative of 1936. As argued more fully elsewhere, the IOC was not, even loosely, a Nazi body, nor did the magnitude and effect of the Berlin Games stand in isolation.11 If the IOC began in 1894 as a small, self-selecting group of aristocrats with a big idea, its quadrennial festival grew incrementally from 1896 toward a climax forty years later. The Olympic idea had leapt into a new dimension not only in 1936 but four years earlier in Los Angeles as well, and the two Games must be seen together. Both benefited from the growing internationalization and exponential popularity of sport in the interwar period. Moreover, the United States and Germany were two of the foremost sporting nations in the world, with an awareness of athletics’ potential to embody nationalistic ideals and enflame common passions. The warmongering vitriol emerging from both sides of the Atlantic when Joe Louis fought the former German world heavyweight champion Max Schmeling in 1938 was perhaps the culmination.¹² The impact of both cities on the Games was immense. The total ticket sales doubled in Los Angeles, then more than doubled again in Berlin, with thirty-two years elapsing before the Games would attract more live spectators (at Mexico 1968). Stadium capacity increased by around 60 per cent (and has hardly been exceeded since), and in the Olympic village (Los Angeles) and the torch relay (Berlin) the final elements were added to the Games’ symbolic inventory. After Berlin—ignoring the hastily arranged austerity Games in London 1948—record numbers of cities and countries would apply to host the event.

These two Games helped the Olympics achieve some parity with the world fairs that had inspired them in the late nineteenth century. In 1932 and 1936, they assumed a scale of precision, organization, and spectacle that would come close to the expos for awe, keep pace with their socialist sporting rivals (the Workers’ Olympics of 1931 in Vienna, not to mention the Soviet spartakiads, had hosted one hundred thousand spectators in a purpose-built stadium), and put the Olympics firmly on the cultural map.¹³ Having just witnessed the greatest Games in the “leading sport nation of the world,” as the 1936 official report later put it, Germany had much to emulate.¹⁴ Overwhelmed by the experience of 1932, Diem was nonetheless quietly confident, and soon received an unexpected boost.¹⁵ From 1933, National Socialism became a syncretism of all things popular and, after initial reluctance, rode the wave of sporting enthusiasm and gave the Olympics its first full backing from a national government.¹⁶ Having planned an event that would cost four million reichsmarks, Diem ended up with a stadium that alone was worth over six times that figure.¹⁷ With such support, the Berlin organizing committee gained the financial and political infrastructure to add to the organizational momentum of Los Angeles. Communication technology was raised to the highest level, reaching the largest ever international radio audience and, for the first time in Olympic history, television viewers in special centers around Berlin.18 The worldwide publicity campaign tapped into the psychology of prospective tourists and Berlin, a swinging metropolis of the 1920s and home to the world-famous UFA film studios, put on the Ritz as well as Hollywood, organizing receptions, banquets, balls, and a summer evening festival with great panache.¹⁹ Writing in his diary about a garden party thrown by Goering, U.S. Ambassador William E. Dodd noted “there was hardly anything that modern inventors could have added.”²⁰

Most importantly, the Games proved a huge success with competitors and sports enthusiasts alike. The athletes were housed in a sumptuous village, and Jesse Owens famously observed that he had experienced no discrimination in Germany.²¹ The spectacle elements offered fantastic entertainment. In the most “elaborate show” Dodd had “ever seen,” the stadium was “lighted by electric machines . . . [and] curious electric streams of lights meeting some two or three hundred feet above the performances.”²² Ticket pricing was leveled out in comparison with Los Angeles, ensuring full stadia for almost every event. The childhood memories of German-Jewish émigré and cultural historian Peter Gay brim with excitement. The occasional sight of Hitler might have been “a nauseating by-product,” but the Games were “breathlessly anticipated and just as breathlessly enjoyed”—“the atmosphere was electric and contagious.”²³

In terms of organization, spectacle, and symbolic capital, subsequent Games have done little more than tinker with Berlin’s blueprint. In this important sense, 1936 was the making of the modern Olympics. Brundage, typically, embarrassed the 1972 organizers on public visits to the Federal Republic by comparing the forthcoming event with its “infamous” predecessor, but Nazi sympathies were hardly a prerequisite for holding the 1936 Games in esteem.²⁴ Some IOC members (such as Britain’s vociferous Lord Aberdaere) might have resented the Germans, but the Games themselves did not come under attack. In fact, continuity of personnel after 1945 ensured that the majority of IOC members would remember the Berlin Games with fondness. At the London Olympics of 1948, Diem was delighted to hear the crushing verdict on the English capital’s inferior management of the event—“pas de comparaison.”²⁵ Vitally for the Munich organizers, this—now unfashionable—attitude to Berlin still broadly held sway when they were conceiving and executing their plans in the 1960s.

IOC member and former Olympic horseman Vladimir Stoytchev was a prominent case in point. Despite liberating the Balkans at the end of the Second World War as commander in chief of the Bulgarian army, he was a close ally to Daume and Brundage and a great admirer of 1936.²⁶ When invited to represent the president as the guest of honor at the seventy-fifth-anniversary celebrations of the German Olympic movement in 1971, he gave a speech portraying Germany as the incubator of Olympic ideals. These, he claimed, had emerged not despite, but almost because of, unfavorable political conditions, and the IOC had gladly awarded the Games to a German city again because of the country’s proven ability to protect Olympism against all odds. Munich, he had little doubt, would be “a triumph—a triumph of peace and friendship between nations, a triumph of advancement and the progress of humanity.”27 In the absence of a reliable biography, it is difficult to determine the nuances of Stoytchev’s political convictions, socialization, and worldview: the grandson of the mayor of Sarajevo and a graduate of the Maria Theresia Military Academy in Vienna, he held prestigious posts as military attaché in Paris and London in the interwar years and headed the Bulgarian diplomatic mission in Washington from 1945 through 1947.²⁸ Yet it is safe to say that he typified the IOC old guard which, on account of its seniority, past distinction, and membership of an autonomous global elite, retained and exercised a right to individual opinions and decisions regardless of political circumstances that were changing around them. His less than referential attitude to communist apparatchiks in the 1960s and 1970s is clear evidence of this.

The Bulgarian’s ideological allegiance to German Olympians might have been more pronounced than others’. Daume certainly kept Federal President Lübke (who became the target of a GDR smear campaign in 1965), footage of the torch relay, and any memory of Leni Riefenstahl out of the application film Munich—A City Applies.²⁹ And Polish IOC member Włodzimierz Reczek slammed the Games’ slogan in Rome announcing that “short distances” in Germany could only refer to the proximity of the concentration camp to the gas chamber.³⁰ But this outburst might well have helped rather than hindered Munich’s cause, and a decisive appreciation of Germany’s organizational pedigree seems to have been widespread in sporting circles around the world. If the letters received by Munich’s mayor before the bid in 1965 and 1966 are anything to go by, the memory of 1936 was central to some decisions to vote for the Bavarian capital. Brazilian IOC member Magalhães Padilha gave Vogel an “expression of his undivided support” as “the German city and German organizational talent [were] all very familiar to [him] since participating in the Olympic Games in Berlin.”³¹ Once the Games were awarded to the city, the world press was equally convinced the Germans would put on a “perfect” show, a mantle the organizers were happy to cite as an encouragement to their team or to justify the financial and emotional expenditure on the Games.³²

However, explicit linking of 1972 with 1936 would have been anathema to German public discourse in the 1960s. In fact, one of the first responses in the Munich City Council when Hans-Jochen Vogel presented the proposal addressed the negative image of national prestige and the 1936 Games.³³ Daume might have casually remarked that dictatorships had it easy when putting on large sports festivals, but the OC never publicly used 1936 as a reference point.³⁴ In its appreciation of Berlin, therefore, the awarding body stood critically at odds with the sensitivities of the recipient nation. If Munich was about the making of modern Germany, it would have to negotiate Berlin’s making of the modern Olympics.

DEALING WITH BRUNDAGE

The Munich organizers tended to counter Brundage’s entrenched opinions with pragmatism, and when it came to the memory of 1936, they behaved no differently. Arguably, they even played fast and loose with it. Vogel had little knowledge of Brundage before the bid. In fact, his recent assertion that he was unfamiliar with the president’s exact involvement with the 1936 event is probably true, since this was not told in detail until the publication of Richard Mandell’s book The Nazi Olympics in 1971.35 The mayor and his colleagues in the city council would have relied heavily on Daume’s intimate acquaintance with the workings of the IOC and its dominant leader. Brundage had already assured Daume in November 1965 that he would welcome a bid from Munich because the Germans had shown their organizational competence in 1936, and when Vogel and Deputy Mayor Georg Brauchle took a sixty-hour round trip to Chicago for a ninety-minute meeting with him a few months later, they were well primed.³⁶ Vogel recorded stressing the modest Helsinki Games of 1952 rather than Berlin as a model for Munich,³⁷ but notes taken in Brundage’s hand capture how the president perceived the politicians’ pitch as it unfolded.³⁸ For those who knew Brundage, the “reasons for selection” would have formed a predictable set of bullet points: “1964–68: Europe’s turn”; “German archaeology”; “1936 (Dr. Karl von Halt, so well known, lived in Munich).” Under a line on Brundage’s notepad, the category “new things” (such as “fine facilities,” “cultural aspect,” “less expansion,” which would indeed become essential objectives over the subsequent six years) also played their part. While it was these “new things” that the German visitors highlighted in a press conference on their return, in the Midwest they had not shied away from elements of the “German Olympic imagination” that appealed to their host: archaeology and Berlin.³⁹ These were targeted at a particular audience and after the successful outcome of the bid were rarely used again.⁴⁰

When it came to the lives of others, however, Daume was by no means hypocritical. The previous year, he had delivered a heart-felt laudatio at Halt’s funeral, praising his NOC predecessor for “his impeccable intentions” and reputation “in the whole sporting world” as a “respected protector of the great Olympic legacy.”⁴⁹ Around the same time, he—warmly but somewhat unbelievably—recalled his winning over hostile journalists in occupied Brussels when announcing the death of IOC president Henri de Baillet-Latour.⁵⁰ The explanation for such remarks lies both in the amnesiac nature of German public life after the war and Daume’s willingness to engage across generations. Socialized in the old world of German sport, Daume had reached maturity on assuming responsibility for the new. At the national and international level, his skill lay in the ability to foster innovation without alienating tradition. And it was precisely this difficult balance that played a major role in winning the Games. While currying favor with Brundage and Halt’s old friends, the Munich team simultaneously secured the goodwill of the IOC’s progressive new guard.

Throughout the 1960s, younger members of the committee had harnessed various currents of discontent in a bid to topple Brundage. Most prominently, a campaign to democratize the IOC aimed to permit each nation an elected representative on the committee and regularize meaningful exchange with the international sports federations.⁵¹ Giulio Onesti, president of the Italian National Olympic Committee (CONI) and warmly supported by the Eastern bloc and the underrepresented African nations, played a key role in these debates.52 First voicing his complaints in 1963, he went on to stand against Brundage in the 1968 presidential election. As Daume noted, however, “there is always something the host [of the session at which the bid is decided] can do,” and Onesti and the Italian Olympic establishment proved very useful.⁵³ Daume presented Onesti with an original wooden sculpture from the Grünewald era, and the Italian responded by providing vital access to the anti-Brundage lobby and invaluable assistance to the German team.⁵⁴ Italian journalists accepted invitations to Munich and were treated with great care “to ensure intensive press coverage in Rome before and during the IOC meeting.”⁵⁵ CONI advised visitors from Munich’s tourist office that “important circles in the IOC” were keen to get away from “concrete” Olympics and approved the winning slogan “Spiele im Grünen” (Games in green surroundings).⁵⁶ They helped plan the successful exhibit at the Foro Italico, arranged a press conference on Munich’s behalf, and, perhaps most importantly, gave council on how to influence IOC members without causing irritation.⁵⁷

Bringing the Games to Munich, therefore, involved dealing with the old and the new in equal measure. Such a balancing act was both necessary and possible in a relatively closed international setting, well away from the eyes of a critical public. When it came to staging the Games under domestic scrutiny, the emphasis inevitably tilted toward the new. De Coubertin, Baillet-Latour, Edström, and Diem—depicted in Daume’s funeral oration as waiting to welcome Karl Ritter von Halt to heaven⁵⁸—were never mentioned again in the same breath. Dead and buried, their problematic legacies, however, would resurface over the following six years. In terms of personnel, public personalities, central Olympic events, locations, and the concentration camp at Dachau only thirty-five kilometers from the new Olympic stadium, 1936 was never far away.

PERSONNEL

The number of people required to organize an Olympic Games runs well into the thousands. It is a simple fact of 1960s West German society that a representative sample of its talented and well-positioned citizens would carry some burden from the past. In such cases, Daume tended to give the benefit of the doubt, writing in one of his first major position papers on the Munich Games: “A view of history, in which everything a nation did under a dictator or criminal regime is thought of as bad . . . seems questionable to me.”⁵⁹ On matters of individual selection, he was, typically, ungrudging. Assessing a proposal to appoint the famous self-confessed SS officer, poet, and American university professor Hans Egon Holthusen to the arts committee, he noted: “Personally, I am inclined to look at all these things magnanimously and leave it at that.”⁶⁰ And in 1971, he was happy to defend the appointment of August (formerly Baron) von Fink, one of Hitler’s great financial supporters, to the new curatorium of the NOC’s proselytizing sister society, the German Olympic Society (DOG).61 Daume’s attitude was firmly in keeping with the times: even at the height of the protest movement in 1968, 41 percent of non-student youths (as opposed to 13 percent of students) and 43 percent of the population in general considered an individual’s past irrelevant to their suitability for public service. Yet as Daume realized too, it was “also necessary, of course, to safeguard the international image and avoid presenting targets.”⁶² There were obvious sensitivities in many other parts of the world, and sustained and vigorous attack could be expected from the GDR (see chapter 6).

The past tainted the highest echelons of the OC. The most senior post on the full-time payroll (general secretary) was occupied by Daume’s tennis partner, Herbert Kunze, a tax lawyer in the Ruhr, treasurer of the German Sports Association (DSB) and vice president of the NOC. As Kunze’s Stasi file reveals, he had become a member of the Nazi party in May 1933 (attending the Referendarlager of the NSDAP/SA in Jüterbog, where young Nazi lawyers received both military and ideological training) and was involved in the SS from its foundation (as a student at the SS-Reichsführerschule in Bad Tölz) and a range of other Nazi organizations. Although the timing of his party membership (as a “Märzgefallener” he was not an “old fighter,” but joined the NSDAP opportunistically only after the elections of March 1933) and departure from the SS in 1936 (“honorable discharge for professional reasons”) could be interpreted as ideological reluctance, his progression through the legal profession to middle-ranking civil servant (Regierungsrat) with responsibility for military expenditure in the Reich Finance Ministry suggests he kept his own interests at heart. The formulaic nature of his denunciation in the East German files might indicate that he was only a minor player in the Nazi state, but it seems that Kunze set aside any reservations he might have had for the sake of his career.⁶³ Bernhard Baier, a sports representative on the OC board and a Ministerialdirigent in the Ministry of the Interior of Lower Saxony, had also been involved with the regime. During the Third Reich, he had belonged to the party (1937) and the SA (1937, Scharführer 1942) and served as Regierungsrat (1942) in the Nazi administration.⁶⁴

Risky though they were, such individuals were highly valued for the organizational experience on which Daume laid a premium, particularly in the early planning stages. He enlisted the advice of the architect of the Berlin Olympic stadium, Werner March,⁶⁷ and argued for the employment of Adam Nothelfer⁶⁸ and Gerhard Hübner,⁶⁹ two key members of “Diem’s staff.” Despite Munich City Council’s reluctance to countenance an old guard return, as the president would recall, the 1972 team contained “a range of people . . . who were there in ’36.”⁷⁰

A central figure in this cohort was Guido von Mengden, Generalreferent to the Reichssportführer von Tschammer und Osten at the time of the 1936 Games and a supporter of Daume’s appointment as general secretary to the DSB and NOC in the 1950s.⁷¹ Mengden had formed part of the entourage that told Brundage what he wanted to hear on his tour to Germany before the 1936 Games. Daume, however, knew the value of Mengden’s experience (“ten times better than Kunze”), and made his own participation in the Games contingent on that of his organizational confidant, despite the fact he had retired in 1963. In 1964, he had defended his integrity in the face of the GDR’s threat to expose him to the IOC.⁷² “An awkward character sometimes,” as Daume later noted, Mengden was “really incriminated, a dreadful Nazi,” and even had “great clout with Hitler.”⁷³ Probably in anticipation of the sharpening of East German knives⁷⁴ and acknowledging his unpopularity in certain circles of West German sport, Mengden accepted a carefully shielded post away from the spotlight,⁷⁵ where he worked as an advisor on a paid contract with the role of “making sure that the issues at hand were properly conceptualized and formulated.”⁷⁶ He acted as Daume’s doorkeeper,⁷⁷ even advising him on the degree to which applicants to the OC had been involved in the Nazi regime.⁷⁸ Most significantly, Mengden was to shape one of the Games’ defining moments from behind the scenes. Although he stepped back from the limelight, the iconoclastic opening ceremony (see chapter 4), which made one of the clearest statements about Germany’s desired break from the past, bore his stamp.⁷⁹

It was not Diem’s name per se that caused furor in Germany, but an uncritical and trumpeting appreciation of the 1936 Games, which seemed to cling to every expression of philhellenism in the world of German sport. In this case—as an assessment by the West German Foreign Office put it—it was accompanied by an unreconstructed view of the events of the twentieth century.⁸³ Quite against the run of German historiography, which was undergoing a paradigm shift in the 1960s,⁸⁴ the causes of the First World War and the year 1939 went unmentioned and dubious phrases abounded: “After the Blitz campaign against France, German troops entered Paris. This success meant that peace seemed just around the corner.”⁸⁵ The GDR had a field day, organizing an international press conference and using the book as a convenient straw-man to rehearse their standard complaints about West German sport.⁸⁶ The Soviets duly followed, but their case was already eloquently put by the vitriolic reaction of the domestic press.⁸⁷ In West Berlin, the senator for Schools and Youth refused to distribute the book unless the history section was removed, and the general uptake outside Bavaria proved very poor.⁸⁸ The Games had taken a significant propaganda hit at home and abroad.

The same potent mixture of Olympic imagination and unqualified admiration of 1936 was evident, perhaps not surprisingly, in the outlook of Carl Diem’s wife, Liselott, who occupied a prominent position in West German sports-science in the 1960s and 1970s.⁸⁹ A Jew who had been sacked from her position as head of women’s education at the Deutsche Hochschule für Leibesübungen in Berlin when the Nazis came to power in 1933, she had taken up an identical position at the newly founded and Sporthochschule in Cologne in 1947, where she eventually received a titular professorship (1965) and became rector (1967–69). Daume’s confidante and ghostwriter,⁹⁰ she was also feted by her old family friend Brundage.⁹¹ His allegiance along with the worldwide connections she enjoyed from her husband’s former network imprinted themselves on the “aristocratic” tone of her correspondence with the “parvenu” Daume. Although like Mengden, her ideas were often progressive, she too was decidedly “old world” in outlook and image.92 Daume appointed her to the founding group of twenty-one on the OC as well as several committees, but she was excluded from the board where the real power lay. She enjoyed minor triumphs, such as resurrecting an exhibition of the German excavations at Olympia, which had been rejected by the arts committee, and then colluding to stage it in a technically outmoded fashion akin to 1936.⁹³ But her attempts to push Carl Diem to the fore and establish continuities with the past were constantly frustrated, in particular by chief designer Otl Aicher (whom she once childishly taunted about the Games’ mascot Waldi)⁹⁴ and press officer “Johnny” Klein (to whom she sent a picture from the 1936 official report of a bare-chested Diem on his morning jog with the organizing team, in the hope that he might use if for publicity).⁹⁵

However, despite hostility from some chief organizers, Liselott Diem succeeded in making a lasting contribution to the way the Games would pass into historical record. Perhaps raising unfair expectations, Daume had approached her at an early stage to write the official report, with logistical support from the Carl Diem Institute at the Sporthochschule.⁹⁶ Diem initially imagined she could work her way to the center via the back door, but her hopes were never realized.⁹⁷ Correspondence with her assistants over many months catalogued a plethora of complaints about blatant obstruction and exclusion in Munich, particularly from the department of visual design.⁹⁸ Quite apart from ideological differences, personal conflicts of interest were also at work. Aicher, who was responsible for the layout of the three-volume report, was also planning a rival tome on the Games’ design.⁹⁹ By September 1973, with the 1974 World Cup beginning to capture the public’s imagination, the report was so behind schedule that the OC forfeited DM 400,000 for late delivery and the board allowed Kunze to end Diem’s contract and take control himself.¹⁰⁰ At the publishers proSport Verlag, Walter Umminger, who had met frequently on editorial issues with Diem and her team, argued his ally’s corner without success.¹⁰¹ The missed deadlines influenced the decision, but the board also harbored concerns that the emerging text was both “unusable” and “full of flaws.”¹⁰² Doubtless the bias of Diem’s historical perspective played a key role in their dissatisfaction, Hans-Jochen Vogel distancing himself, much to the editor’s ire, by personally removing all his own quotations from the manuscript.¹⁰³ But within months, lawyers had established that Liselott Diem’s words could only be changed if factually inaccurate.¹⁰⁴ She was reinstated, Aicher’s volume IV was blocked by Umminger at proSport, and the official report of the 1972 Olympics opened with a triumphant articulation of the “German Olympic imagination,” complete with German archaeologists trumping the French and the organizational excellence and implied innocence of the 1936 Games. The underlying assumptions of Umminger’s publicly decried Olympisches Lesebuch were writ large on the first page of the Games’ official history.

Despite protesting otherwise, Riefenstahl, as a holder of the Olympic diploma, was given a Category C card in 1972, which gave her privileged access to all Olympic venues. While the German organizers attempted several times to block this decision, Daume leaving the IOC in no doubt that he was “very much against Frau Riefenstahl,” Lausanne proved robust in defending someone it viewed as the maker of an “exceptional film.”¹⁰⁶ Other Olympic cities bore her little grudge, Helsinki inviting her to film its Games in 1952 (declined), and Brundage, of course, was an admirer.¹⁰⁷ He supported her during her difficult U.S. tour after Kristallnacht and, responding to a prompt from Carl Diem in 1948, she was presented with the Olympic Diploma originally awarded to her at the IOC session in London in 1939.¹⁰⁸ In 1965, Brundage arranged for a “director’s cut” of the film to be purchased for his private use.¹⁰⁹ The situation in Germany offered a sharp contrast: President Heinemann’s office removed Riefenstahl’s name from the guest list for a reception of Olympic VIPs (to which her diploma would normally have provided automatic entry), and the OC did its best to stop Munich cinemas screening Olympia during the 1972 Games.¹¹⁰

But as the decision by domestic cinemas to show her work suggests (one to packed audiences throughout the Games), neither Riefenstahl nor her film were as universally deplored as the organizers thought. A few years later, when the audience turned on Riefenstahl during the talk show Je später der Abend, 90 percent of letters and calls to the television station defended her.111 In the 1960s, Riefenstahl had begun to enjoy a less fractious image in the rest of the world, and by the early 1970s she was undergoing a renaissance among young antiestablishment figures keen to flout taboos. In 1966, the New York Museum of Modern Art returned her to the big screen with the first retrospective of her films, and in the 1970s Andy Warhol invited her to his art factory. Steven Spielberg said he longed to meet her. In Britain, the tone-setters of hip culture went a step further, turning her into the “foundress of an anarchic pop-ideal.”¹¹² In 1972, Mick Jagger used imagery from her Nuremberg Nazi rally films in his stage shows and allowed her to photograph him with his wife Bianca for the Sunday Times. David Bowie called her a “rock star,” noting for good measure that Hitler was more of a media artist than a politician.

In autumn 1972, the Sunday Times decided to ride this wave of popularity and commissioned the seventy-year-old director of “one of the great documentaries of all time” to take a series of pictures of the Munich Games for its magazine.¹¹³ On 1 October, its cover duly announced “Leni Riefenstahl’s Second Olympics” across a split page with her pole-vaulting images from 1936 (black and white) and 1972 (color). Although the shots prompted little retrospection (sports photography since 1936 had modernized following Riefenstahl’s impulse), the identity of the photographer caused consternation among the Jewish communities of Germany (especially Berlin) and Britain.¹¹⁴ Even before their publication, the British section of the World Jewish Congress denounced them as an affront, not least in the wake of the terrorist attack. The paper remained unmoved, however, vaunting Riefenstahl as “the world’s best photographer in [the] field” and arguing “if her former connection with the Nazi Party . . . were a reason for a permanent ban on her work, then the world’s television and cinema companies should never show her classic film . . . again [when] in fact they do so continuously.”¹¹⁵

The Sunday Times’s recital of the familiar line about sport’s neutrality loses all force when read alongside comments made to Günter Grass a week after the Jewish Society’s complaints. Having agreed to be interviewed about the Games as a representative of the 1972 arts committee, Grass was taken aback by the aggressiveness of the opening question. Asked if the Games had “reawoken any national guilt or paranoia” in Germany, the left-wing author, who had helped Brandt to election victory in 1969, retorted: “I find it hypocritical if the representatives of other European countries, who God knows have a record of guilt, a national record of guilt, point the finger at the Germans like Pharisees on every possible and impossible occasion.”¹¹⁶ In 1972 Britain, Hitler’s legacy seemed good for sales. “His” Games could be used to conjure up the undifferentiating British obsession with German war guilt, while his filmmaker could be hired for fashion and chic.

The Munich organizers’ commissioning of Max Schmeling and Jesse Owens intended the opposite effect. Both were chosen for their “positive image worldwide” as part of a “very small and exclusive” circle that would have included middle-distance star Emil Zatopek but for the political turmoil in Czechoslovakia.117 Payments were made to Owens’s PR agency, and Max Schmeling, who owned the north German franchise for Coca-Cola was assured that money would be no object.¹¹⁸ Schmeling, who had established himself as the Federal Republic’s omnipresent talisman, was a natural choice. For the West German public, he represented “a kind of witness for a better Germany in a time of darkness . . . a sportsman with a conscience who refused to bask in the nationalist rhetoric and racial superiority of the Nazis without ever claiming to have done anything spectacular to oppose it.”¹¹⁹ As one society hostess noted in Der Spiegel in the early 1960s: “He [stood] for too much to be expendable: German strength, German heart, Coca Cola.”¹²⁰ A friend of the newspaper mogul Axel Springer, he visited Khrushchev (in 1958) to plead the case for German reunification, and was hailed on his seventieth birthday by President Scheel as “Germany’s number one sportsman for life.”

Although little heeded, a small minority of left-wing commentators denounced Schmeling for entering a pact with the Nazis.¹²¹ Leaving arguments about naivety and possible coercion aside, it is certainly the case that the regime enjoyed his support in late 1935 when Brundage asked Reichssportführer von Tschammer und Osten to send the boxer or tennis star Gottfried von Cramm to help derail the American boycott. Knowledge of Schmeling’s collusion with Brundage entered the public domain well before 1972. In fact, the boxer’s own accounts of what happened in New York always talked up his role in events.¹²² Mistaking Brundage’s concern about discrimination against the Jews and Negroes on the U.S. (rather than the German) team as genuine, Schmeling claimed to have greatly influenced the Americans’ deliberations.¹²³ Not unlike the Sunday Times’s defense of Leni Riefenstahl, this—albeit deluded—admission in his 1956 autobiography 8–9-aus feeds off the presumed innocence of athletes, even in the face of obvious political intrigue. Tellingly, when Schmeling admitted his “boundless naïveté” in the boycott debacle, he did so only in the context of Hitler’s later refusal to receive Jesse Owens after the black athlete’s medal-winning performances.¹²⁴ In the popular imagination, the infamous “Jesse Owens incident” had become a convenient shorthand for the evil of the 1936 event—one that reduced Hitler to a spoilsport in a stadium while containing the positive ending of a morality tale. It also omitted complicating subplots such as many black athletes’ opposition to the boycott due to racial discrimination in the United States, as well as Owens’s own initial reluctance to travel to Berlin and sudden volte face in 1935.¹²⁵

In the 1960s, however, the narrative of Owens and Hitler was widely disseminated and made Schmeling and Owens the perfect partnership for the 1972 publicity campaign. Owens would kick it off in West Germany. Schmeling would sail into New York harbor, as he had done in 1935. And amid the opulence of a gala dinner on board the cruise ship Bremen in 1971, the two former greats would stand together and invite the world to Germany. Only the GDR commented on the tangled web.¹²⁶

Owens’s unlikely allegiance with Brundage climaxed when two of the OPHR’s prominent representatives, John Carlos and Tommie Smith, famously raised black-gloved fists on the medal rostrum at the 1968 Olympics. After failing to temper the mood of the national squad’s black athletes in the Olympic village, Owens continued his rebuttal of OPHR in his 1970 Blackthink: My Life as a Black Man and White Man.¹³² Premised on a belief that equal opportunity really existed for blacks in the post-civil rights era, the book pulled no punches, making inflammatory statements (if the “Negro doesn’t succeed in today’s America it is because he has chosen to fail”), comparing the Black Power salute to the gestures of Nazi soldiers, and equating “the collectivist, separatist rhetoric of post-civil rights activists” with Hitler’s Mein Kampf.¹³³ Finishing with an extensive account of the “snub of 1936,” Blackthink was positively reviewed in the mainstream American press and received rapturously at the citadel of the “German Olympic imagination”—the Carl Diem inspired Olympic Academy at Olympia—where Owens read from it prepublication in 1969.¹³⁴ Understandably, however, it did little to change his detractors’ view of him as an “Uncle Tom” figure.

At the 1972 Games, some of the racial tensions of 1968 were replayed, albeit less virulently, within the U.S. team. As a sign of apathy rather than all-out protest, Vincent Matthews, a particularly vociferous opponent of Owens in Mexico, and Wayne Collett shuffled their way through the victory ceremony for the men’s 400 meters, refusing to turn toward the American flag, stroking their beards and swirling their medals as they left the stadium to jeers from the crowd. Once again, Owens entered the village in an attempt to persuade the recalcitrant athletes to apologize, alluding to enticing job offers he claimed to have collected from good American companies, while the IOC, in collusion with the U.S. Olympic Committee, was in the process of issuing a life-long ban.135 Owens’s efforts to reconcile Collett and Matthews to his point of view proved as futile as four years earlier. Likewise his attempt to assuage his radical critics earlier that year with a new book, I Have Changed, had equally run aground. Intended as a modification of Blackthink, the book inadvertently moved Owens closer to Hitler: “I never doubted for a single minute that I was totally on ‘the other side,’ never dreamed there might be some parts of me—and of almost everyone—which resembled parts of him. What I think I’ve learned, you see, is that—perverted as he was—Adolf Hitler wasn’t really the villain. Even millions of Germans who fought behind him—many of them who stood in Berlin stadium and applauded me—weren’t the villains. Ideas were the villains.”¹³⁶

One can scarcely imagine a more contorted articulation of the “Hitler snub” than Owens’s final twist. In 1972, however, the ruminations of the Munich Games’ special ambassador on Hitler’s culpability remained unknown in Germany. As in the United States, the Owens myth would probably have proved robust enough to withstand scrutiny and as it happened, world events swayed such issues Owens’s way. With the controversial medal ceremony taking place only three days after the deaths of the Israeli athletes, most of the world, including Matthews’s own family, was not in the mood for “any more intrusion.”¹³⁷ For a brief moment at least, Owens’s views became de rigueur.

The confusion of the Owens myth is instructive, nonetheless, of the contradictions that surrounded the three key public players from 1936 at Munich. Schmeling, the rehabilitated “ordinary German,” fitted the common postwar narrative of selective remembering and new prosperity, with Leni Riefenstahl his mirror-opposite. Conspicuously close to the regime, she was one of a small minority to whom the door of public acceptability in the new Republic remained closed. Yet, in certain Western countries, her star was rising again and, in Britain at least, provided a strangely neutral platform from which to launch uninformed attacks on Germany’s relationship to its past. Generational conflict amongst black athletes in the United States led Jesse Owens to align himself with Brundage, the “nigger hater,” over an antiboycott movement some thirty years in the past and for which scarcely anyone outside IOC circles, not even Schmeling who had assisted it at the time, could still voice support. These cases show that coping with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) could be as complicated outside Germany as it was within it. At the time of the Games, however, such complexity was hardly reflected upon.

THE TORCH RELAY

Several incidents suggest the OC went to great lengths to insure the firm’s participation again. For instance, at least one other company offered to supply torches and technical backup free of charge¹⁴⁰ before the board decided to invite tenders and allow Krupp to enter the running.¹⁴¹ Daume, much to the irritation of his general secretariat, nudged negotiations along via direct and often biased intervention.¹⁴² And an unwieldy compromise had to be struck between the model for the torch and the weight of the material from which it was constructed. Coming in at 2.5 kilos,¹⁴³ over and against the committee’s optimal range of 670 to 740 grams, Krupp’s stainless steel was too heavy for Otl Aicher’s design.¹⁴⁴ Discussions about switching to aluminum proved unfruitful,¹⁴⁵ and caught between artistic intransigence and industrial determination the organizers settled on a model which at 1.35 kilos was not only twice their ideal weight but, by some margin, the heaviest torch in Olympic history.¹⁴⁶ The value of the 6,700 torches Krupp supplied (just over DM 125,000) might not remotely have matched the sums given by comparable firms (see chapter 2).¹⁴⁷ But the real point of interest lies in the company’s desire to have its stainless steel identified with the event for a second time and the committee’s willingness to accommodate it.

A major reason for its inside track was the presence of Berthold Beitz on the OC board. As soon as the water sports were awarded to Kiel in 1967, a town in which Krupp enjoyed considerable influence, it was evident that it would be represented at the highest level of the event.¹⁴⁸ At any rate, as one of the most celebrated businessmen in postwar Germany, Beitz was a real catch. Appointed by Alfried Krupp as his general plenipotentiary in 1953, he enjoyed an extraordinary rise in fortune, helping the company by the 1960s to become “the largest privately owned industrial empire in history” with a stake in virtually every foreign economy and a fortune worth US$1.25 billion more than Rockefeller’s.149 Having prevented the deportation of Jews to concentration camps while working for German Shell in Poland, his war record, moreover, made him a rare commodity: an internationally recognized “good German” with positive press in the Jewish world and the Eastern bloc. One of the few Germans honored in Yad Vashem, he was hailed in Warsaw as “an outstanding emissary” of his country.¹⁵⁰ Suspicious to the oversensitive Adenauer, he later provided invaluable advice to Brandt and his Ostpolitik team. In business, he was no respecter of tradition and represented the “newer model of manager” that emerged in the Federal Republic and marked the death of the mythological “ ‘factory father’ who cared as much for his firm and his family of workers as he did for profit.”¹⁵¹ A modernizer with an untainted past, Beitz was an inspired choice for Krupp and the OC alike. A newcomer to the world of sports management, he quickly proved promotion material and was fast-tracked onto the IOC ahead of the successful mail order magnate, travel agent, and multiple Olympic medalist Josef Neckermann.¹⁵²

Yet Krupp’s relation to the past was marked by continuities and repression.¹⁵³ Its PR department relegated the Nazi period to a footnote in a narrative about the company’s exemplary provision of social care for its workers reaching back to imperial times. In the 1950s and 1960s, this selective account was both underpinned by and used to support the West German state. No other firm played such a significant role in state visits: the federal government, aware of the public’s critical gaze, conveniently outsourced the pomp and ceremony of its representative duties to the legendary magnificence of Krupp’s receptions, while Krupp exploited the state’s backing to oppose the Allies’ intention to remove it from coal and steel production. The massive site in Essen promoted positive discourses about postwar Germany and the “Kruppian social cosmos,” with its workers’ apartments, food stores and hospitals, was often shown to visitors on their way through to the Eastern bloc.¹⁵⁴

The acceptance of Krupp must be seen, of course, against the broader rehabilitation of the German business world both at home and abroad. In the Federal Republic, leading industrialists, incensed at the stripping of Krupp’s assets and the twelve-year prison sentence passed down to Alfried by the Nuremberg judges, rallied round their colleague and bombarded the American authorities with letters demanding his release. The West-Verlag rushed out its defense of German industry Schwerindustrie und Politik (Heavy Industry and Politics) and Krupp itself commissioned Tilo Wilmowsky to write Warum wurde Krupp verurteilt? (Why was Krupp Convicted?). Both books—based on the mantra about power relations in Nazi Germany, “the state commands the economy”—were well received by politicians and many sections of the West German public.¹⁵⁵ Over forty years later, Daume’s assessment of Krupp as an “all-round decent man” and “representative scapegoat” is typical of the mood of the time, particularly among industrialists.¹⁵⁶

In the United States, too, conservative intellectuals and business leaders closed ranks around their German counterparts in an act of solidarity intended to protect Western interests in the burgeoning Cold War.157 These self-regarding, internationally connected elites readily picked up their prewar contacts. There is no direct evidence that Brundage encountered Alfried Krupp at the 1936 Olympics, but given the latter’s gold medal in the sailing competition and the lively forum for business exchange that the Olympics had provided since Los Angeles 1932, it would be surprising if they had not met.¹⁵⁸ Brundage pleaded Krupp’s case with the U.S. authorities, and might well have played a part in the German’s early release in 1951.¹⁵⁹ Nationally and internationally, then, German industrialists in the 1950s could successfully portray themselves both as victims of the Nazi regime and defenders of the nation’s culture and economy.

As S. Jonathan Wiesen demonstrates, West German industrialists’ relation to the past was based on a “paradoxical urge” both to bury it and control it via careful self-projection. More than “anguished confessions of guilt or . . . the achievement of psychic closure,” memory for this important segment of German society “was about the very public presentation and manipulation of symbols, lessons, and experiences.”¹⁶⁰ There is surely no finer example of this than Krupp’s reappropriation of the torch relay in 1972. Having secured the right to supply the vital equipment, the company exploited its symbolic capital. In a full-page advertisement for stainless steel in 1972, Krupp trumpeted the continuity between 1936 and 1972 and its own role in preserving it.¹⁶¹ Underneath the Olympic rings and framed by large pictures of the two torches, a text projected Krupp’s supposed stainless past as a means for creating an aesthetically pleasing and durable future:

Nirosta—the steel that’s eternally young

Munich 1972—where the world’s young sporting elite will meet. Sporting games, comradely competition, finding out how good one is. Looking forward to being there. Being there like NIROSTA, Krupp’s high-grade steel—forever young. Like these Games, indestructible, and multifaceted in use. Whether as an elegant cup or an aesthetically pleasing symbol such as the Olympic torches for Berlin 1936 and Munich 1972. NIROSTA—Krupp’s high-grade steel—a material to master the future with.

It matters little that the reality almost failed disastrously, the Bundeswehr having to prevent major embarrassment by reassembling six thousand torches when one in ten turned out to be faulty.¹⁶² Nor is it of importance that in 1972 Krupp needed the flame more than the flame needed Krupp, the firm at this stage still recovering from its shock collapse as a private concern and forced conversion into a single-stock company in 1967. Rather, the real significance of Krupp’s advertising rhetoric is the self-assurance with which it could latch onto the presumed innocence of a sporting symbol and transfer it to itself. Equally telling is the company’s complete expectation of and—as a glowing comparison of its two torches in the sports magazine Kicker testifies—gaining of public approval.163 For postwar German industry, this was business as usual.

In other domains, however, the nature of the continuity suggested by the torch was open to debate. Not surprisingly, Liselott Diem, who was a member of the relay committee, read the event in a manner similar to Krupp. Her working notes for the relevant chapter of the official report contain an account by Fritz Schilgen, the final runner of the 1936 relay,¹⁶⁴ and her proposal for the 1972 route—which she envisioned going to former Olympic sites around the globe—breathed an unproblematic, all-enveloping universality.¹⁶⁵ Despite the committee rejecting the grand scheme, her concept and convictions remained unshaken. In a speech at Olympia during the summer of 1972, she talked up the itinerary on which the OC finally settled as the longest stretch the flame had actually been carried by runners (as opposed to riders, drivers, and cyclists) and drew parallels with the one her husband had planned for the 1940 Games between the ancient civilizations of Greece and Japan.¹⁶⁶ Once again, however, Diem was forced to conjure up her dead husband from the margins, as much to her regret the OC gave no publicity to the inventor of the event.¹⁶⁷

Weeks later, at the official flame-lighting ceremony in the same location, Hans-Jochen Vogel delivered a somewhat different speech. Taking as his theme the “timelessness” of the Games and the relay and “their ability to span the whole world and bring nations together,” he observed that Olympism both “disappointed and uplifted.” Just as the festivals of ancient Greece had excluded all but a small minority of free men, he argued, the Games of the modern era scarcely lived up to the “immaculate nature” of their ideal. Nonetheless, Munich hoped to be enveloped, if briefly, by the assembly of all humanity, a longing most aptly expressed by Albrecht Haushofer, who had set out his poetic vision of the Olympic flame for posterity in 1944 while a political prisoner in Moabit.¹⁶⁸ Haushofer’s verses, which Vogel cited at length in his climactic invitation to Munich, had a double edge. For one, they skillfully wove rupture into a narrative of continuity, and opened up the issue of German guilt and the 1936 Olympics without direct or simplifying accusation. For another, they served as a subtle but unmistakable broadside to the military dictatorship that had governed Greece since 1967. (Vogel, ever the political animal, had even sought advice from Brandt’s office as to whether he should go to Olympia if the Greek prime minister was in attendance.)¹⁶⁹ Unlike Krupp and Diem, the only thing that Vogel found “forever young” in this setting was a sense of German culpability and the lessons that needed to be learnt from it. Unfortunately, the Greek hosts provided a less than conducive setting for his sentiments. Night and day, the army guarded every step of the torch’s way, serenading it in heavily militaristic tones that the Munich organizers had expressly wanted to avoid. To rub salt into the wounds, the populace greeted the German delegation with the predictable “Heil Hitler.”¹⁷⁰

PLACES

In Berlin itself, the Olympic Stadium—like other sports facilities, buildings, industrial plants, and military installations that had sprouted up under the Nazi regime—found rapid reuse after the war in a city ravaged by heavy infrastructural damage. After the removal of Nazi insignia, such buildings were treated as “the products and proof of a non-political sphere of industrial modernity” and “as if they did not belong in any specific sense to the history of the Nazi state.”¹⁷³ Renamed Olympiastadion by the Berliner Magistrat, the Reichssportfeld soon played host to a wide range of sporting and cultural events. Max Schmeling fought for the last time in front of twenty thousand spectators at the Waldbühne in 1948, one hundred thousand soccer fans watched Germany lose two to one to Turkey in 1951, and in the 1950s and 1960s, the complex hosted an illustrious mix of Catholic and Protestant Kirchentage, the annual “Große Polizeischau,” British army tattoos, and a range of rock concerts, including a riotous Rolling Stones gig in 1965.¹⁷⁴ For West Berliners, the site of the 1936 Games, therefore, provided a pragmatic and stigma-free home for large-scale events in the city. This view was largely shared across the Federal Republic: five out of ten German soccer championships in the 1950s were held in the Olympic stadium, and in 1951 even Jesse Owens returned with the Harlem Globetrotters, stepping out of a helicopter to a rapturous welcome from seventy-five thousand spectators from all parts of the city.¹⁷⁵

On one level, the Munich organizers went to some lengths to articulate their solidarity with West Berlin. Although they rejected the Berlin Senate’s attempts (supported by the federal Ministry of the Interior) to appropriate elements of the cultural program,¹⁷⁶ they held their board meetings in the city on two occasions with the expressed aim of maintaining “close contact with the sports authorities and organizations of Berlin”¹⁷⁷ and “once again embodying the connection between the Olympic cities of Munich and Berlin.”¹⁷⁸ In the midst of Cold War tensions, proudly highlighting the link between Germany’s two Olympic cities made political sense as an act of civic boosterism for the beleaguered former capital. On another level, however, the idea of transplanting even the smallest symbolic recollection of Berlin to the heart of the Munich project met with a distinct chill. As a site of memory, rather than simply a location of sports and popular festivals, the Berlin Olympiastadion had made no effort to “open up the doubtless difficult context that made the place infamous.”179 A merging of pragmatism and presumed sporting innocence had been evident in the restoration of Nazi features around the site: from the natural stone cladding and the Führerloge to, most patently, the bell tower and the militarily resonant Langemarckhalle (renovation by the original architect Werner March between 1960 and 1963). At the 1968 Oktoberfest, an international PR agency presented Vogel with a stone from the stadium for laying at the new Olympic site. However, as Press Chief “Johnny” Klein later informed the donors, at a time when delegates at the IOC session in Warsaw were taken to see the graves of 1936 participants murdered during the Nazi occupation, Berlin would have to remain off limits.¹⁸⁰ What might have been perfectly acceptable in West Berlin—in 1966, the stadium became one of only two architectural objects to be placed on a 182-strong conservation list—was clearly not in Munich.¹⁸¹

The name Carl Diem—commemorated with others at the Berlin stadium after the war—proved equally unpopular in Munich.¹⁸² Although some seventy streets or squares were already named after him in the Federal Republic, the Munich City Council remained resolutely opposed to following suit. Vogel had informed Daume that in Munich, a city with “particularly strict regulations and binding resolutions when it came to the memory of the Third Reich,” “desk drawers were full of the appropriate material” in anticipation of a Diem-proposal.¹⁸³ To avoid “raking up the political past” at an open session of the city council, it was decided to restrict the naming of the twenty-two streets, bridges, and squares in the Olympic district to renowned former champions from abroad, with the exception of de Coubertin, the archaeologists Curtius and Dörpfeld, and the deceased deputy mayor Georg Brauchle (d. 1968) who had been instrumental in the city’s bid. Some of those honored were virtually unknown to the wider public.¹⁸⁴ Few could have identified James Connolly (the triple U.S. medalist in the jumping events at the inaugural Games in Athens) as the name behind the infamous Connollystraße of the terrorist siege. The council’s grasp of German Olympic history proved shaky too. Willibald Gebhardt, the first German member of the IOC who tenaciously fought modern sport’s corner against the Turner, was mistaken for an athlete. Helene Mayer, the half-Jewish silver-medal-winning fencer on the 1936 German team, was honored too, but her inclusion rested on a myth of resistance similar to that of Jesse Owens. Remembered as one of the few Jews on the German team and viewed by dint of her victory as a triumph over adversity, she had in fact simply flown in from her home in the United States to compete, after which, having given the Nazi salute and won her medal, she returned to safety.¹⁸⁵

Diem’s omission from the “carefully” constructed list nonetheless caused a variety of complaints, not just from his wife.186 Some sections of the press followed the issue supportively, distinguishing between the deserving Diem on the one hand and party diehards such as Ritter von Halt and von Tschammer und Osten on the other.¹⁸⁷ Max Danz, a sports representative on the board, felt sufficiently moved to raise the issue at two critical meetings of the committee: first at an extraordinary session three days before the opening, at which sponsorship of an exhibition at Dachau to commemorate sport’s fight against fascism was being contemplated,¹⁸⁸ and secondly four months later during a discussion about the erection of a monument to the Israeli victims of the terrorist attack (see chapter 7).¹⁸⁹ Danz’s interventions at such insensitive junctures demonstrate the almost militant, residual belief in Diem’s innocence amongst certain functionaries. Daume, as usual, attempted to mediate, suggesting that the independent fundraising body for the Games (the Olympic Sponsors Association) might quickly organize a Diem exhibition that could evolve into a permanent Olympic museum under the aegis of the Sportpark GmbH.¹⁹⁰ Despite his best efforts, no one in Munich would rescue the architect of Berlin.

Beyond Berlin and its central acteurs, decisions about locations followed a more pragmatic line. The choice of Kiel to host the water sports for the second time is a case in point. When various international federations refused to compete on a southern German lake, the landlocked Munich organizers were forced to look to the north coast.¹⁹¹ Ranked equal with its rival Lübeck on sporting and infrastructural criteria,¹⁹² Kiel eventually won the day for reasons of national security.¹⁹³ Amid a plethora of dissenting voices from other government offices, the Ministry of Defense advised that westerly winds around Travemünde could blow the naval support teams into zonal waters and provoke retaliation from the GDR.¹⁹⁴ Strikingly, the lengthy discussions and correspondence over the difficult issue of selection never touched on the city’s link with 1936. For this, Kiel doubtless had its annual international regatta to thank—the “Kieler Woche,” which dated back to 1882 and, despite misuse for Nazi propaganda, had been reconvened in the summer of 1945 by enthusiastic British occupiers. By the early 1960s, Kiel had become an annual focal point of world-class sailing, Baltic culture, and Scandinavian performing arts—features prominently reflected in its contributions to the 1972 cultural program.

In the former “capital of the movement,” too, discussions about locations for central cultural events proceeded with scant attention to a site’s status under the Nazi regime. Thus, the Olympic flame, which for practical reasons arrives in the host city on the eve of the Games, was housed overnight on the Königsplatz. This square—framed on three sides by nineteenth-century buildings celebrating Bavaria’s Hellenophilic past (Glyptothek, Propyläen, and the Neue Staatsgalerie) and completed on the fourth by Paul Ludwig Troost’s “severely neoclassical” 1930s Führerbau and Verwaltungsbau—marked “the political and administrative nerve center” of the party.195 Its shrubbery and trees had been replaced by twenty-two thousand square meters of flagstones to facilitate military parades and other infamous scenes of Nazi history, such as the book-burnings of 1933. The most significant single project of the arts program—a world-leading exhibition costing DM 5 million and entitled Weltkulturen und moderne Kunst (World Cultures and Modern Art)—was housed in Troost’s other Munich commission, the Haus der Kunst.¹⁹⁶ The regime’s first major piece of architecture, the lime-faced neoclassical museum “possessed immense ideological significance,” not least as the site of the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung from 1937 to 1944.¹⁹⁷ Neither location was first choice. Originally, the Theresienwiese had been selected as a suitable place to receive the Olympic flame with a “joyful celebration,” and the Neue Pinakothek chosen to house the showpiece exhibition.¹⁹⁸ But the former foundered due to the Oktoberfest, which was normally half erected by late August, and the latter came to nothing because the 1967 prize-winning design for Alexander Freiherr von Branca’s gallery was still in the planning phase and the Bavarian state government prudently refused to prioritize spending in a rush to have it completed for the Games.¹⁹⁹ In the event, the Königsplatz and the Haus der Kunst were chosen with the same insouciance that had informed their omission in the first place. In selection and nonselection alike, the Nazi past played no role whatsoever.

The reason for this is twofold. First, in postwar Munich—much as in West Berlin—the devastated urban landscape demanded that undamaged buildings and infrastructural hubs be put to use again with little regard to their Nazi legacy. Thus, the Haus der deutschen Kunst soon reopened, with a subtle airbrushing of its title, as an exhibition space in 1946. It hosted a show by Blauer Reiter artists in 1949 (who had previously featured as prominent exemplars in the infamous “Degenerate Art” display) and in the 1950s drew in crowds of up to eighty thousand and one hundred thousand respectively for its annual Große Kunstausstellung München and displays by international artists.²⁰⁰ At the Königsplatz, the largely unscathed Nazi party buildings provided homes for incongruously civilized institutions, the Führerbau eventually becoming the Hochschule für Musik, and the Verwaltungsbau the Haus der Kulturindustrie, which housed the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte. The “flagstone sea” (“Plattensee”) on the square gradually transformed itself into a city-center parking lot, a natural urban development enshrined officially by city council law in 1961 (but prohibited for aesthetic reasons for the period of the Games).²⁰¹

Beyond such pragmatic amnesia, there was a second reason for the organizers’ apparent historical indifference. At the time they were making their decisions, the public discussion addressing the practical use of former Nazi sites in Munich had not yet reached consensus. In the mid 1960s, the normalization of architectural legacies that characterized the 1950s was increasingly problematized, with the Königsplatz and the Haus der Kunst featuring prominently in the debate. Conservatives angry at the city’s modern development highlighted the concreted indignity of the Königsplatz and pleaded for a return to the green idyll of prewar days; opponents argued that the square possessed a beauty and functionality that transcended its Nazi influence.202 At the same time, traditionalists and modernists clashed when the Bavarian State Architectural Commission proposed demolishing the Haus der Kunst as part of a road-widening scheme for the Altstadtring, the former arguing its neoclassical look enhanced the city better than recent progressive architectural choices, the latter wanting it razed to the ground.²⁰³ In the end, the Haus der Kunst survived virtually unaltered, although the Games’ space requirements provided the modernist lobby with an opportunity to wrap two temporary Plexiglas frames around the back of the building and “conceal its strongly monumental character.”²⁰⁴ Both debates show that in the vital preparatory phase of the Games, architectural “memory was anything but stabilized.”²⁰⁵ With matters unresolved in the 1960s, it is not surprising the organizers stayed within the common postwar parameters of pragmatic usage.²⁰⁶

Nonetheless, although not primarily chosen for their historical resonance, both the Königsplatz and the Haus der Kunst became sites of rupture and reflection during the Games. In the case of the Königsplatz, there was a gentle remolding of expectations. Although set against a heavily classical backdrop, the arrival of the flame in Munich was celebrated with a mix of local and international folkloric talent rather than military pomp. The Munich Bläserbuben accompanied a short ceremony in which Daume and Vogel delivered brief speeches, and the scene was lightened with airy performances by folk groups from Romania, Mexico, and the famous Medau dance school.²⁰⁷ The contrast to Berlin’s bombastic embrace of the flame and the heavy tone set by subsequent host cities could not have been greater.

The Haus der Kunst issued an even more obvious invitation to reflect. Searching for a theme “that was not restricted to national or sporting motifs,” local curator Siegfried Wichmann conceived an exhibition of importance to the world of art in general and to West German self-presentation in particular.²⁰⁸ In its final manifestation, Weltkulturen und moderne Kunst sought to demonstrate the influence of the Asian, African, and American continents on European art in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.²⁰⁹ This reversal of the donor-recipient model between first and third worlds (which played a key role in the diffusion of the Olympic ideal) intended to suggest that many parts of the world had achieved cultural freedom long before decolonization. Although pilloried by Liselott Diem²¹⁰ and Avery Brundage (a collector of Asian art who reported to his advisor: “It was as well that we did not participate”),²¹¹ it was widely regarded as a cutting-edge international event. At the same time, exhibiting supposed “primitive” art forms at a resonant Nazi location in a display of mutual enrichment with European modernity would also, as the official report suggested, “eradicate an inhuman prejudice and demonstrate a new cosmopolitan understanding of art.”212 In its desire to fuse time and space, the report even erroneously located the show at the same site as the “Degenerate Art” display, and gave the year as 1936.²¹³ The agenda of international art history, therefore, blended with the organizers’ second choice of venue to create a statement that read as an atonement for pan-European arrogance and Nazi ideology. The exhibition and the Haus der Kunst had both a “cultural-political value” and an “immanent political significance.”²¹⁴

In the official report’s account of the exhibition, broad cultural politics certainly softened hard politics per se and smoothed off the edges of overt German reflection. Such hedging about of the German past was evident elsewhere too. For despite laying out the national significance of the exhibition in their rationale, the artistic organizers made no such reference in their catalogue that accompanied the event.²¹⁵ President Heinemann was a reluctant patron and declined to write a foreword. Daume expressed diametrically opposed opinions to different groups of listeners. Writing to Heinemann, on the one hand, he stressed the “particular significance” of the location—with the official report’s Freudian slip—as a counterpoint to the “site of the [Nazi] exhibition” in 1936.²¹⁶ In Stern magazine, however, he denied the venue’s symbolism and, referring to the Italians’ unselfconscious use of the Foro Mussolini for the 1960 Olympics, bemoaned “the inability of the Germans to come to terms with their own history.”²¹⁷ Daume’s contradictions typify the way in which the 1972 organizers dealt with historically resonant locations in Munich and potential transfers from Berlin. As generally the case in both cities after the war, pragmatic usage of the Third Reich’s architecture became a part of everyday life. But as the impossibility of transposing a single stone from Berlin to Munich suggests, the problems began when the everyday unfolded onto the symbolic. At Munich 1972, the Haus der Kunst was suspended between its everyday status and a carefully embedded statement about the German past.

But Heinemann was not without contradiction himself. In 1969, he pledged to support a memorial service at the Dachau concentration camp in conjunction with the Games, telling Daume and the OC personally that “it would round off the image the Games would give of Germany.”²¹⁹ After giving further assurances of his intention to attend, he withdrew unexpectedly in the summer of 1972.²²⁰ Although “diary commitments” were presented in August as the official apology and a wreath sent in lieu,²²¹ an internal memo from five months earlier tells a different story: “BP [Federal President] does not wish to participate in the memorial.”²²² It is not clear why the president changed his mind—leaving the political sphere to be represented by federal minister Egon Franke, Vogel, and opposition leader Rainer Barzel—but his behavior is symptomatic of a strange mixture of well-meaning obligation and distinct unease that characterized the OC’s relation to the event as well.

Although the idea for the service originated from and was nurtured by the board—not least to draw the sting from potentially more critical events planned by other nations—the OC held the event publicly at some distance.²²³ “A potentially tricky matter of protocol,”²²⁴ as Daume observed, it was organized officially in Munich by the two Christian churches and the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde, and, because it was impossible to circumnavigate, the International Comité Dachau, the representative body of former camp inmates who had established an inalienable right to participate in all such activities on the site.²²⁵ After difficult negotiations with the latter over the program, the event went ahead on the eve of the Games (25 August) with some two thousand participants from around the world.²²⁶ Four actors read texts composed in Dachau and Berlin in 1936; William Pearson, a black soloist (as the press constantly noted) from the Cologne Opera, sang from the Psalms; and the cantor of the Kultusgemeinde gave a rendition of the Hebrew Lament for the Dead. Neither Brundage nor any other IOC official attended, and—rather hypocritically—the OC declined to cover the costs.²²⁷

As this chapter has shown, such differing ways of citing the 1936 complex were fully in keeping with the time. In terms of the 1972 project, however, Galinski’s unambiguous endorsement of the Federal Republic carries most significance. For if 1936 shadowed the organizers, it hardly overshadowed them. They dealt with it as and when, sometimes with more appetite and conviction than at others. Berlin 1936 might have been unavoidable but, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, the past was not an obsession for those mapping out the new Germany.

3

The Legacy of Berlin 1936
and the German Past

Problems and Possibilities

THE IOC AND 1936

DEALING WITH BRUNDAGE

PERSONNEL

PERSONALITIES

THE TORCH RELAY

PLACES

3

The Legacy of Berlin 1936and the German Past

Problems and Possibilities

THE IOC AND 1936

DEALING WITH BRUNDAGE

PERSONNEL

PERSONALITIES

THE TORCH RELAY

PLACES

The Legacy of Berlin 1936
and the German Past