The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany

The DWB luminaries who took charge of the Brussels project rejected original plans to present “the complete German cultural production” (with Gutenberg, Goethe, et al.)3 and infused it instead with the guiding principles of postwar German design: transparency in public architecture connoting the openness of the new democracy, and an emphasis on everyday objects in the private sphere to rebalance the intrusion of the National Socialists into domestic relationships.⁴ DWB president Hans Schwippert, who had overseen the reconstruction of Düsseldorf and the new parliament in Bonn, devised a concept to be housed in a building commissioned from his modernist contemporaries Egon Eiermann (the Neckermann building in Frankfurt) and Sep Ruf (the American Consulate in the Munich). The “German pavilion” that took shape in the Brussels suburb of Heysel was the very antithesis of Albert Speer’s monumental tower in Paris. Constructed of glass façades resting on steel skeletons, a series of quadratic, two-story units appeared to float naturally within the contours of the site’s uneven landscape. Inside, the exhibit was sparingly furnished with domestic objects of the highest quality that gave a stunning impression of contemporary German living spaces. Celebrating the postwar era’s restored “happiness in life” (Lebensheiterkeit), the German Pavilion stressed the “friendliness” and “beauty” of its workplaces and homes as “bulwarks against fascism and communism, A-bomb anxiety, and Cold War militarism.”⁵ By integrating products from foreign manufacturers, it sent clear signals about the country’s internationalist intent too. Somewhat controversial among conservatives at home, the German effort was praised both nationally and internationally. Erhard hailed it as a confirmation of the Federal Republic’s honorable membership of the Western alliance; Federal president Theodor Heuss, a DWB president himself before the war, drew parallels to an exhibition planned by the association during the Weimar Republic; and, warmly supported by the press, the Brussel’s Expo jury awarded the Germans joint second prize (behind Czechoslovakia) in the competition for best overall exhibit. The strategy of allowing design elites to focus on their own work had proved a winning formula.

Against such innovation, however, the content of the pavilion seemed to regress. Given more exacting guidelines by the Canadian organizers about the themes of the fair—“man the creator,” “man the producer,” “man the explorer,” “man the provider,” “man and his health,” “man and the community”—the German team had to look beyond the horizons of its own design excellence, and after initial delays, neither a satisfactory nor a unified concept emerged. Nonetheless, hoping to show “that Germany was a creative and indispensable part of European culture,” the Federal Republic went to great lengths to present the riches of its historical legacy.⁸ While the famous Ulm College of Design was featured, there was in effect a return to the traditional conception that would have gone to Brussels in 1958 had the DWB not intervened; design per se was crowded out by exhibits on music (a glass wall tracing its development in manuscript form from Bach to Stockhausen), church life (the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin and ecclesiastical architecture), theater, museums (a cast of the Kugelzahn fish from Solnhofen, a Roman gravestone from 70–100 AD in Cologne, and the Bockhorst Triumphkreuz from 1200 AD), and displays of a historical nature on industry and research. The show was completed by a library and display of the best sculptors of the twentieth century.

In contrast to Brussels, Montreal was far from an unqualified success. While the 1958 jury had mildly criticized the German exhibit for the “abstract nature of some of its topics and presentational aspects that lacked warmth and feeling,” these complaints were writ large over the Germans’ efforts at Montreal.⁹ Briefed by the German organizing team in June 1966, U.S. and Canadian consultants to the exhibition were alarmed at what they had seen. Writing immediately to Bonn, they praised the pavilion as a “highly impressive . . . architectural achievement,” but expressed strong reservations about the exhibits it would house:

The total effect is one of unrelieved heaviness. The average North American will come out of the Pavilion with the feeling that he has been subjected to an extremely intellectualized lecture in a rather dull museum with no opportunity to relax. . . . The teacher, i.e. Germany, will be respected, but he will not be liked because he will be demanding too much. . . There is nothing warm and personal, nothing charming and friendly about anything in the Pavilion. . . . There is an absence of feeling of hospitality, of communion between the visitors and the hosts . . . the story it tells is dull because the light touch is missing.¹⁰

The German press tended to concur.11 In the summer of 1966, therefore, just as the Munich Olympic team was beginning to turn the preliminary blueprint of its bid into a viable long-term vision, Bonn seems to have reached a crossroads in its self-presentation at international events. While the excellence of German architecture and design could be relied upon to make an impact abroad, the essence of the country’s image remained in some doubt. The archive shows no connection between the incipient planning for Munich and the final preparations for Montreal. This lack of coordination is not surprising, perhaps, given the highly devolved nature of the Games’ organization, especially in the early phases when the line of communication ran mainly between Daume and Munich City Hall. It was certainly echoed later when the Munich team was scarcely consulted about the 1971 World Fair in Osaka. The Munich organizers set their own agenda, without explicit reference to Brussels or Montreal. Their main achievements, however, should be seen in the context of, and measured against, West Germany’s performance in the Canadian capital. While exploiting the country’s recent strength in design, Munich, without realizing it, would go on to turn the North Americans’ critique about style and substance on its head.

ARTS

Athletes arriving early at the Olympic village in 1972 might have been forgiven for agreeing with the consultants. Waiting for them on their bedside tables was the Organizing Committee’s official present, a four-hundred-page book entitled Deutsches Mosaik, translated into English, French, and Russian. Originally intending to condense the monumental and much-acclaimed anthology of German intellectual endeavor Deutscher Geist (published as an act of “inner resistance” by Peter Suhrkamp not long before his deportation to a concentration camp in 1940 and reissued to international acclaim in 1966¹²), the committee had settled on a new version targeted at foreigners.¹³ Aiming to act as “a calling card for Germany’s recent intellectual rehabilitation,” the volume concentrated on the twentieth century and made few compromises on intellectual standards.¹⁴ It was originally to be edited by Inge and Walter Jens, before governmental misgivings led to their removal.¹⁵ Featuring Einstein, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Freud, to name but a few, it would, in fact, have made an excellent university primer in modern German studies.

Not surprisingly, Vogel could muster little enthusiasm for the idea when it was first mooted, fearing, with some justification, “that the text would be too demanding for the majority of competitors.”¹⁶ But Daume was a bibliophile who delighted in the sumptuous editions of Brecht and Proust that Suhrkamp owner Siegfried Unseld sent to adorn his bookshelves.¹⁷ An educated “Bürger,” he scavenged literature for bon mots that he scattered extravagantly and eclectically in his public addresses.18 He could weave a speech to a Chinese audience around Goethe (comparing his ideas on continuity and change to the Olympic movement), or pepper another with Luther, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Nietzsche in quick succession.¹⁹ Later president of the Erich Kästner Society (from 1981) and chair of the e.o.plauen-Gesellschaft (from 1992), Daume mixed business and pleasure from an early stage, inviting the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, for instance, to give a lecture at the annual conference of the German Sports Association (DSB) in 1954. The Deutsches Mosaik was Daume to a tee: after two years of discussion—as one irate government minister was informed—he had pushed the arts committee to approve it “with misgivings and only lukewarm support,” and given his word to the publisher before final consultation with the board.²⁰

Daume promoted his own interests in similar fashion with the Edition Olympia—twenty-eight posters commissioned from world-famous artists to be published, against Vogel’s better judgment again,²¹ by the OC and Munich’s Bruckmann Verlag.²² An art lover, whose office at the OC’s headquarters in the Saarstraße “looked like a studio with all its kinetic objects and contemporary sculptures,”²³ Daume chased major names (Picasso, Chagall, Miró) with substantial honorariums.²⁴ He reveled in hosting leading figures in his Feldafing villa, for instance, to discuss a possible ballet spin-off with the Bavarian state operas. Ultimately infeasible—because of Miró’s excessive demands—the dance project proved an unfavorable omen for the posters.²⁵ Some artists made only a perfunctory effort to link their work with the sports event, and the early results caused “the shaking of heads” and “barely stifled mockery” in the OC.²⁶ Oskar Kokoschka, who opened the series with a somewhat lethargic depiction of the Greek Kouros, caused a flood of letters to Munich City Hall²⁷ and was lambasted in the press for reproducing a figure with “the posture of someone who had spent too long at a desk.”²⁸ Although generally deemed one of the many successes of the Games—more popular participants including Serge Poliakoff and David Hockney—the art project hardy matched initial expectations.

The Deutsches Mosaik and the Edition Olympia stemmed from the same cultural matrix as the content of the Federal Republic’s exhibit in Montreal, and in the same way, they enjoyed no more than a mixed reception. But the connection between sport and the arts that manifested itself in Munich drew its inspiration from Olympic discourse as well. De Coubertin had always perceived sport as part of high culture and persuaded the delegates at the 1906 IOC congress in Paris to conjure up the muses with competitions in literature, music, and the visual arts from 1908 onward. In 1912, under a thinly veiled pseudonym, he won a medal for literature himself. The founder’s enthusiasm was not always shared, though, and some hosts embraced the competitions with more zeal than others. Berlin expended great energy on them, the Germans carrying off no fewer than thirteen gold medals, whereas London 1948 (like its counterpart immediately after the First World War, Antwerp 1920) treated them coolly.29 In the 1950s, the competitions faded and were replaced by burgeoning cultural programs that could draw in world-class artists no longer affronted by the obligation to submit their work or performance to judgment by jury. Daume’s love of the arts might have come from the innate sensibilities of the educated German bourgeoisie, but it was enhanced by the Olympic ethos and the “German Olympic imagination,” sustained under Carl Diem’s influence either side of the war. For Daume, like Diem and de Coubertin, sport was a cultural entity, and he worked hard to nurture its relations with music, art, and literature in universities, businesses, churches, and the media.³⁰ Brundage too was both a believer and aficionado. Almost as well known in the 1960s for his art collection as his Olympic office,³¹ he bought jades and bronzes from the Asian market with a millionaire’s passion and purse, taking his own expertise very seriously in the process.³²

This confluence of personal, national, and international interests gave the Munich event a particular shape, not least when the bid was being prepared. Before submitting, Vogel and Daume wrote individually to Brundage, assuring him that “the art-loving city of Munich” would stage “Games of extraordinary beauty characterized by the uniting of bodily and spiritual development”³³ and suggesting that “no city in the world” was better suited to “enriching [the Olympics] with cultural values” and “returning [them] to the classical ‘contest of carriage and songs.’ ”³⁴ In April 1966, Vogel told Italian journalists that “Munich would put on Olympics in the spirit of Baron de Coubertin.”³⁵ And at the decisive session in Rome, the president duly gave delegates a steer by bemoaning the disappointing standard of the fine arts program at recent Games.³⁶ In their efforts to return to Coubertinian principles, the Munich team even planned to revive two events last conducted—either at all or with any real passion—at the Berlin Games of 1936: a lavish festival play to be performed (à la Diem) on several evenings in the main stadium and the aforementioned arts competitions.³⁷ Like many of the group’s initial ideas, however, both projects were quietly dropped when planning began in earnest, despite Günter Grass’s suggestion of a “Lyrikolympiade” (Poetry Olympics) with a final to take place in the Olympic precincts.³⁸

Nonetheless, a forty-day arts program (Olympic Summer) soon took shape and drew exclusively on artists “who could match the high level of the sports events.”³⁹ Undeniably elitist in tone, it was leavened, more successfully than either the Deutsches Mosaik or the Edition Olympia, by a sense of progressiveness and cooperative internationality. Led by an arts committee that included leading representatives from different generations—Grass, Hans Egon Holthusen, Erich Kästner, Alexander Kluge, Günther Rennert, Carl Orff, Carl Zuckmayer, Friedrich Luft, and Herbert von Karajan—it was divided into classical, contemporary, and avant-garde sections. Major exhibitions (such as Weltkulturen und moderne Kunst) were accompanied by classic and modern theater, from Schiller and the Royal Shakespeare Company to Broadway’s Negro Ensemble Company and Moscow’s puppet theater.40 Twelve countries performed over seven weeks at an International Folklore Festival, which was complemented and contrasted by jazz and the MUSIK, FILM, DIA, LICHT Festival, offering countless first performances of electronic, vocal, pop, beat, improvised, and computer-generated music. The Olympic village cinema showed films from twenty-two countries, and a meeting of young European writers, journalists, painters, sculptors, and scientists discussed the Olympic ideal, “often in strong and irreconcilable terms.”⁴¹ Kiel produced its own impressive, if more high-end, program, with an exhibition Man and Sea that brought together the nations of the Baltic coastline, a Stockhausen premier, and operas and ballets from Stockholm, Sofia, Hamburg, and Copenhagen.⁴²

De Coubertin would have been delighted, but Avery Brundage—in the contrary spirit that characterized the final years of his presidency—was not. Recent events had given Lausanne grounds for concern. As the Munich team was going to the drawing board, their counterparts in Mexico had been putting the final touches on an arts program that surpassed all others. Exploiting the unique opportunity to attract nations that would not normally have given the country a second thought, Mexico organized a year-long program that drew in five million visitors. Orchestras, ballets, and jazz artists from thirty-five nations took part, and some forty countries (from Guatemala to Ethiopia and China) contributed to the folk festival.⁴³ The IOC fretted about the viability of such large-scale events in the future, and the following year clearly instructed the Munich team to restrict its arts program to a national venture. The OC, however, had already approved a full international festival, and Daume, with the scheme so close to his heart, proceeded regardless, giving false assurances that it would comply with the IOC’s wishes.⁴⁴ Over the following two years, Lausanne reiterated its position on numerous occasions but the Munich organizers remained evasive until it was too late.⁴⁵ At the IOC session during the Winter Games in Sapporo in February 1972, Brundage finally capitulated, but not before stressing deep regret and clamping down on the cultural dimension of the next two Games in Montreal and Moscow.⁴⁶ Although considerably shorter and attracting fewer visitors than Mexico, the Munich arts program eclipsed it in real terms: fifty nations provided fifty-seven operas, seven operettas, three musicals, ten ballets, thirty plays, forty-two orchestral concerts, eight choral concerts, twenty-four chamber and solo concerts, twenty-two orchestras, fifty-six conductors, seventy soloists, and six exhibitions. It was attended by 14 percent of the 4.5 million who traveled to the Bavarian capital.⁴⁷

DESIGN

In the period after 1945, Mexico City and Munich were exceptional in their cultural engagement with the Olympics. In its texture and composition, however, Munich had more in common with Berlin. The reason for this, again, is that both German Games were imbued with a sense of responsibility to the founder’s original vision. Inspired by Wagner and the philosopher John Ruskin, who created the English arts and crafts movement, de Coubertin conceived the Olympics as an event that not only contained art and music but formed a complete work of art itself. Few cities recognized the Games’ fundamental aspiration to create “a unity of the athlete with the spectator, . . . the surroundings, the decoration, [and] the landscape,”⁴⁹ and only Munich and Berlin ever attempted it. In 1930, Diem noted that “the festive character of previous Games had left much to be desired from the viewpoint of harmony” and set himself the goal of producing a “Gesamtkunstwerk” by means of a festival play.⁵⁰ Olympische Jugend (Olympic Youth) became an impressive undertaking that involved a cast of ten thousand, singing and dancing to music by Carl Orff and Werner Egk under a cathedral of light whose beams met high above the stadium, and culminating in the choral movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But when the Nazi government took a shine to the Games, the “work of art” expanded to an unprecedented dimension and the whole of Berlin transformed itself into a harmonious Olympic organism. Decorative schemes combining “utility with beauty, simplicity with colorfulness,”⁵¹ massed gymnastic displays, and perfectly flowing traffic arteries “produced a rare density and fullness of signs” across the city.⁵² The continued fascination of the Berlin Games lies predominantly in the power of its unified aesthetic. In 1972, no one set out to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, the concept forming neither part of the bid nor holding much appeal for the organizers who found it “presumptuous.”⁵³ But—immeasurably more than the cultural program—it was the outcome that most clearly defined their Games. Whether originally intended or not, Munich 1972 became a Gesamtkunstwerk, albeit one created by a core group of specialists working to transcend the memory of 1936.

OTL AICHER

Aicher’s involvement was opposed by some, mainly older, members of Munich’s art and design establishment. Graphic designer Richard Roth (b. 1908), backed by Ludwig Huber, an OC vice president and the Bavarian minister of culture,⁵⁷ accused his younger colleague of profiteering, complaining he neither came from Bavaria nor had studied there for any length of time.⁵⁸ But Aicher enjoyed warm support from many in the local scene. The head of the Bavarian section of the DWB, Werner Wirsing—who had cooperated with Roth on an exhibit in Brussels, was later to chair the OC’s design committee (until 1969), and would build the women’s quarters in the Olympic village—wrote to Vogel in his favor.⁵⁹ And correspondents at the influential liberal newspapers, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit, championed his aesthetic.⁶⁰

Besides the plaudits and prizes, Aicher had much to offer. The aversion of postwar architects and designers toward “gigantism,” an article of faith most notably demonstrated by Schwippert’s Bundeshaus, fitted Daume’s notion that “the bombastic style of the Third Reich in 1936” would “rule itself out straightaway” in Munich.⁶¹ Specifically, as cofounder of the Ulm College of Design in neighboring Baden-Württemberg, Aicher played a key role in the postwar revival of the Bauhaus. Developing a general aesthetic for architecture, photography, and design products that valued “the good, the beautiful and the practical,” the influence of the school and the reputation of its collaborators extended far beyond the confines of its provincial Danube backwater. A broad educational remit attracted the support of distinguished guest lecturers, including Theodor Heuss, scientist Werner Heisenberg, philosopher Max Horkheimer, historian Golo Mann, and authors Heinrich Böll and Ralph Ellison. Like its Weimar predecessor, the school was “infused with a grand vision of social reform, based on the reconciliation of art, life, morality, and material culture,” and sought to encourage a progressive industrial climate that would lead to spiritual renewal.⁶² In reaction to the aesthetic of Hitler’s artists and architects with their legacies of monumentalism and emotional manipulation, it rejected pathos and created a look that was “cool, functional, [and] rational.”⁶³

Finally, Aicher’s intellectual radius swept the two main organizers up within its arc. Although not always appreciating Vogel’s managerial manner, he published a series of articles from the early 1960s onward that echoed the mayor’s concerns about urban development, one dealing specifically with Munich in Die Zeit of November 1967.⁶⁷ Aicher shared Vogel’s vision of the city and its surrounding region as an inseparable entity, his Strahlenkranz (later spiral of fortune) emblem for the Games (modified by Cordt von Manstein) serving as a “symbol of shining Munich and the alpine foothill landscape with its light and flowers.”⁶⁸ More importantly, Vogel’s arts expert, Herbert Hohenemser (1915–92), assessor of culture at Munich City Hall and later chair of the OC’s arts committee, had been accepted into the designer’s circle after meeting in 1946.⁶⁹ And an instinctive understanding must have developed with Daume too when provisional discussions were held before the final bid in early 1966.⁷⁰ As in his relationship with Vogel, Daume will have discovered sufficient common ground and enough divergent interests to allow a successful working partnership to flourish. For instance, Aicher considered art a mere escape from the manifold demands of the postwar German present, a single semester at the Munich arts academy having led him to prioritize “the street” over “the museum.”⁷¹ But this clear difference of opinion created an organizational space in which Daume, with Aicher’s approval, could indulge his passion for the high arts in Munich. At the same time, both men shared an eye for the visual and valued its impact. In Daume, Aicher found someone who, like himself, saw the world as an “Augenmensch:” “He thought with his eyes . . . comprehended by seeing. . . . He had a suspicion of things that could only be known cognitively. . . . For Daume the Olympics were not a task to be mastered through competent organization. . . . That was the job of experts. It was the event he planned, and the way it looked. What people remember when they go home afterward. Essentially he planned the physicality, the tangibility of the Games.”⁷²

Aicher’s philosophy of design, moreover, chimed with Daume’s concept of sport. Despite their inherent differences, Ludwig Wittgenstein, from whom the former drew his inspiration, could be made to form a convenient fit with the latter’s oft-cited Johan Huizinga. For the Austrian philosopher, as for the Dutch historian and theoretician, all human culture was grounded in play and the rules of play. “Cultural and social programs,” as Aicher expounded shortly before his death in 1991, “consist in the playing out of rules. Where there is conflict, contradiction and contestation, the definition of rules leads to play.”⁷³ When it came to creating an aesthetic for the greatest games of all, Aicher and Daume’s congruent philosophies converged and augmented each other: “the freedom of play,” Aicher later noted when talking about Munich, was “not about leaving rules to chance” but ensuring “maximum variation” via “strict discipline and adherence to rules.”74

But against Daume’s fertile flights of fancy, Aicher regarded the Olympics pragmatically as “a task to be mastered through organization.” In a groundbreaking presentation to the OC on the nature of visual images (“Erscheinungsbilder”) in late 1967, he hailed design as an Ordnungsaufgabe that aimed at “unity” and “uniformity.” Munich would evolve into a Gesamtkunstwerk—doubtless too Wagnerian a term for Aicher but one that perfectly captured his project—from the principle of “identity through relationality.” Not unlike Gugelot’s modular furniture with its standardized interchangeable parts, which was very influential at Ulm, uniformity would be achieved by a system that combined variable elements in a flexible but rule-bound and readily identifiable “relational grouping.” This “all-encompassing visual appearance” went beyond the need to create a mere “ceremonial framework,” of course. As Aicher clearly stated, it was imperative to deliver the “correction to Berlin” that the world was expecting.⁷⁵

Set against the left-wing intellectual politics of the day, Aicher’s further exposition on Berlin, however, turned out to be counterintuitive. Like many of the reactionary members of the IOC who had voted for Munich on the basis of its infamous predecessor, he had no hesitation in acknowledging the 1936 Games as “a high point in Olympic history.”⁷⁶ A research trip to the Olympic Museum in Lausanne had convinced him that Berlin was the moment when the Olympics had blossomed from a “sports event” into a “world festival” (Weltfest): “In Berlin, for the first time, there was a separate campus that built the sports venues into a landscaped area, the bell that summoned the youth of the world, the cathedral of light, and a specific emphasis on decorative art.”⁷⁷ This unprecedented degree of material and aesthetic engagement, Aicher noted, had provided the regime with a major propaganda coup, based on two interrelated strategies. Eschewing verbal means that “would have aroused suspicion,” the Nazis had accentuated the “the new state’s visual mode of expression, neo-classical architecture, enormity of scale, naturalistic sculpture, the colors red and gold, symbols and emblems of youth and power.” Turning to the task in hand, Aicher asked the OC: “Will the world believe us if we say that Germany is different today to what it was then?” Responding himself, he said: “Trust cannot be gained through words, but instead only through visual proof and the winning of sympathy. It is not about explaining that this Germany is different, but about showing it.”⁷⁸

Simultaneously embracing and rejecting Berlin, Aicher projected Munich as its photographic negative:

There will be no demonstration of nationalism, and no enormity of scale. Sport will no longer be considered an adjunct of, or preparation for military discipline. Pathos will be avoided, as will ceremonial awe. Depth is not always expressed through earnestness. Lightheartedness and non-conformity stand just as much for serious subjectivity. The Munich Olympics should have an unforced character and be open, carefree, and relaxed. It is clear that this will give them an emphatically celebratory character. Celebratory not in the traditional institutional sense but in terms of playful improvisation.⁸⁰

This “psychological climate” and carefully “calibrated mood” would be created, in practice, by a combination of three basic elements: scripts, signs, and colors. Every Olympic text—from tickets and lunch vouchers to publicity brochures and the winners’ certificates—was printed in Univers, an elegant sans-serif typeface created by Swiss designer Adrien Frutiger in 1957 and presented internationally at the Montreal Expo of 1967.⁸¹ Directionally neutral but possessing the effortless ease of pen and ink, it was considered “inextravagant,” “agile,” “fresh,” and “carefree.” It combined “correctness and practicality with the stamp of youth.”⁸² Its inventor’s foresight, moreover, appealed to Aicher’s sense of discipline and order. Numerically quantified on a geometric grid, Univers was the first font to come with a listing matrix to help designers determine size and style.⁸³ In Munich it would be used, Aicher observed, without “imposing headlines,” “bold emphases,” or “aggressive font sizes,” doubtless in homage to the democratic Bauhaus style of lowercase.⁸⁴ The words to which it lent visual form were laid out in long, thin columns to dismantle monumental blocks of information, a format that was later translated onto the distinctive elongated flags that adorned the Olympic site and the city’s transport hubs in carefully choreographed groupings.

Visitors to the Olympic venues would be impressed by the overall Erscheinungsbild, but equally importantly, they would need to be guided by it to their destinations. Here too, Aicher was keen to avoid any sense of compulsion, preferring to regulate the massive additional flow of human traffic around Munich by “steering visitors indirectly with information that allowed them to choose themselves the way they wanted to go.” Developing the pictograms invented by Masaru Katsumie to help tourists negotiate language difficulties at the Tokyo Games, Aicher designed a system of easily understandable symbols based on the twenty-one Olympic sports disciplines and a further hundred generic signs.⁸⁵ Obeying simpler rules of grammar and interpretation, Aicher’s pictograms were less abstract and subjective than their Japanese inspiration.⁸⁶ Bodies were reduced to their major component parts, and like the implementation of the Univers font, positioned within an exact grid of orthographical and geometric coordinates. Rules and grids determined the proportions of heads, torsos, limbs, the representation of sports equipment, and the distinguishing features of male and female athletes. Vitally, the pictograms gave a sense of flow and movement, and harmonized with the posters Aicher designed to advertise the sports events themselves. Hanging either side of specially designed walls, the monochrome action shots overlaid with distinctive and contrasting colors produced a “flicker” effect when passed by vehicles and pedestrians.⁸⁷

For all this, Aicher’s eye was drawn primarily to light blue and its supporting cast of green, white, and silver—his original memorandum to the OC in 1967 making no mention of the rainbow at all. The sky-blue shade in which the pictograms were drawn and the ill-fated Olympic security force (Ordnungsdienst) clad on the day of the terrorist attack had much to recommend it. Not only did opinion polls confirm it as Bavaria’s most popular color (it featured heavily in the Land’s flag), but as “the color of peace” and “the color of youth” it exuded social and political significance as well. Despite the yellow-and-black of the city’s coat of arms (the Münchner Kindl, a girl wearing a monk’s habit), Munich was widely known as “the white and blue capital” (weißblaue Hauptstadt). Aicher attributed this less to the flag than the region’s landscape. As “the color of a shining sky,” of lakes and alpine silhouettes, light blue was the very essence of Upper Bavaria. Under certain climatic conditions, especially when warm winds blow northward from Italy, Munich enjoys “clear bright days und a deep blue sky,” which bathe the Alps in light blue and create an illusion of close proximity to the city.⁹⁰ These colors, as the organizers were wont to repeat—not always without arousing cynicism in foreign listeners—contrasted with the other dominant hues selected for the Games: the silvery white and the light green of the region’s lakes, hills, and meadows.⁹¹

Significantly, white and blue were central to the southern German baroque. Although Aicher neglected to mention it to the OC in 1967, the historical reference would feature prominently in the designer’s justification of his choice over subsequent years. For one, the baroque accentuated the contrast between Munich and its 1936 predecessor. Ignoring the inconvenient location of Wagner’s spiritual home in the north of Bavaria, Aicher claimed that the “powerful dark colors of Bayreuth,” “the pathos of opera,” and the “pompous metaphysics of the [country’s] bourgeoisie” characterized Berlin, while Upper Bavaria’s abundant baroque—“charming village churches,” “organs and spinets”—offered Germany an alterna tive mode of expression and self-representation.92 For another, the compositional techniques and effects of the period’s music bore a striking similarity to the designer’s guiding principles—an implication overlooked in even the most recent Aicher scholarship.⁹³ Contrary to the modern notion of individual genius as the necessary precondition for great art, baroque culture emphasized the ability of the craftsman to follow and apply strict rules. As in Aicher’s own work, the lightness and cheerfulness of baroque music derived from discipline and regularity.

Finally, the baroque helped justify the designer’s disapproval of the retreat of modernity into museums and theaters and enhanced his understanding of the relationship between culture and society as one marked by daily life, public spheres, and visual markers. “Compared to the baroque culture of visual design and open spaces, as still evident to some extent in the shop signage and house decorations of Bad Tölz,” he observed, “the street culture of Munich [was] in a sorry state.”⁹⁴ This was not irreparable, however, and the Munich Games offered the perfect opportunity “to demonstrate the Munich of today: an open, youthful, lively city.”⁹⁵

Breathing the spirit of the baroque and imbibing the lifeblood of the Bauhaus, Aicher produced a simple but all-encompassing concept for the Games. In his presentation to the OC in 1967, he had warned that “an unambiguous decisionmaking hierarchy” and “increased authority for the design chief” would be necessary “to prevent a variable system losing its potency and ultimately disintegrating.”⁹⁶ He protected this ruthlessly across the whole Olympic enterprise, threatening to resign on the rare occasions any aspect of it came under pressure, twice controversially finishing a task himself when not satisfied with the result of an open competition: the emblem (with von Manstein) and the official poster. With these two notable exceptions, which received only lukewarm public approval, his vision achieved critical acclaim.⁹⁷ It determined every aspect of the Games’ aesthetic. “Printed matter, posters, brochures, tickets, mastheads, short television slots, flag arrangements, . . . insignia” all appeared in his “colors and formats.” Personnel were supplied with jump- and safari suits, cut by the Parisian fashion designer André Courrèges, who had already supplied new uniforms for the city police, which were color coded by Aicher according to function (e.g., orange for the Games’ technical personnel, red for referees and judges, etc.). The traditional Bavarian Dirndl (dress, blouse, and apron) was given a modern revamp in sky blue with white trim and worn, with matching makeup, by thousands of hostesses around the Olympic venues.

At the same time, Aicher’s concept was all-embracing in its political ambition. While sharing Daume’s desire to return sport and the Olympics to some notional origin of play, he believed in the power of design to create a real social utopia. Such ideas drew from the technocratic belief in feasibility and broader “discourse of democracy” (Demokratiediskurs) that were widespread among the “1945ers.” Like Ralf Dahrendorf and other commentators, Aicher sought to address the political deficits in a society that in many other respects had been dynamic in its modernization.98 Like Vogel, whose political creed revolved around the concepts of participation, individual fulfillment, quality of life, social justice, and human dignity, he endeavored to take the notion of democracy beyond the realm of the state and its institutions, rooting it firmly in society and increasing the freedom and participation of the individual within it.⁹⁹ Following Jürgen Habermas’s famous statement—”democracy can only come about in a society of mature and responsible citizens; which is why it is not possible under any random social preconditions, or indeed even under specific ones; rather, this free society is the condition itself”¹⁰⁰—Aicher viewed design as a means to reduce, or even eradicate, authoritarian structures in education, work, leisure, and recreation.¹⁰¹

This sweeping vision would turn the Munich Olympics into a huge playground, in which spectators and athletes could interact freely and regardless of nationality, race, or creed.

BEHNISCH AND PARTNERS

That playground would require considerable work, however, before becoming physical reality. Although the possession of a brownfield site in common public ownership made the Olympics viable in the first place, the transformation of the Oberwiesenfeld in the north of the city presented a major challenge. Munich was characterized by a historical north-south divide. Against the affluent suburbs of the south, which opened out onto a rising landscape of lakes and alpine foothills, the north was dominated by working-class neighborhoods where social housing, homeless shelters, and displaced persons’ living quarters jostled with industrial and sewage plants, military training grounds, and the city’s landfill site. In this milieu, the 2.8-square-kilometer site had served a number of purposes since the eighteenth century, functioning variously as an army camp, parade ground, horseracing track, and airfield for zeppelins and hot-air balloons. In 1931, it began to provide space for the city’s first civilian airport, most famously receiving Daladier and Chamberlain on their way to preserve “peace in our time” in 1938. After the war, it blended with its drab surroundings, taking on ten million cubic meters of rubble from the allied bombing raids, which altered its contours, most notably producing a towering hill (Schuttberg) at its southeastern perimeter. A grim reminder of the recent past, the “rubble mountain,” a hill on which natural growth eventually developed, came to be used as grazing pasture for sheep and a practice slope for winter sports enthusiasts. While no stranger to play, the Oberwiesenfeld of the mid-1960s, however, could hardly be described as playful. By 1972 its terrain would have to house a stadium, swimming pool, multipurpose gymnasium, practice facilities, media center, housing for some seven thousand athletes, and all in stunning surroundings.

But as Aicher noted in his paper to the OC in November 1967, concurrent with but independent of his own initial deliberations, the organizers had made good progress toward deciding on an architectural concept that would serendipitously “harmonize with the overall design and its intentions.”102 In 1967, the committee realized the city’s preexisting plans to build a sports stadium on the site and decided to run an open competition for a set of venues fit to host the Olympics. A month before Aicher delivered his presentation, the jury had selected a winner, but was still debating the feasibility of its central features. The emergence of the Stuttgart practice Behnisch and Partners (B+P) from a field of 104 competitors was a greater “stroke of luck” than Aicher might have realized. Popularly credited with the design’s success, Günter Behnisch, another “1945er,” attended only a few of the initial meetings and was less involved than his subsequent reputation suggests.¹⁰³ Were it not for the enthusiasm of his young partner architect Fritz Auer (b. 1933), who had followed the Olympics avidly since collecting cigarette card albums of the 1936 Games as a child, the company would not have entered the field at all.¹⁰⁴ Until that point, the firm had concentrated on schools and universities. But Auer, Cord Wehrse, and Karlheinz (Carlo) Weber (b. 1934)—another partner who later took responsibility for modeling the surrounding landscape—produced a concept of such breathtaking novelty that it swept to an overwhelming victory in the final round (seventeen votes to two).¹⁰⁵ Other than Daume and eight politicians from the city, Land, and state, the jury, chaired by Egon Eiermann, included expert judges such as city-planner Herbert Jensen and local architect and caricaturist Ernst Maria Lang.¹⁰⁶

B + P’s design was based on the concept of “non-architecture” and impressed the judges for three reasons.¹⁰⁷ First, it met the tender’s demand for a stadium to hold ninety thousand spectators (a capacity later reduced to eighty thousand) while avoiding any hint of monumentality.¹⁰⁸ In 1936, Werner March had been forced to give way on his Bauhaus-inspired plan to leave the stadium’s inner workings exposed under a skeleton of steel, glass, and cement when Hitler refused to welcome the world to a “modern glass box” and instructed Reichsbaumeister Speer to intervene.¹⁰⁹ March’s design was clad in limestone dug from “native German soil,” supplemented with 136 columns and imposing cornices, and surrounded by monumental statues that celebrated the cult of the body. Rising majestically above a level axis, the Olympic stadium of 1936 made unambiguous statements about Germany’s resilience, power, and will to succeed.¹¹⁰ Munich would need to strike a different note and the architecture of the most recent Games in Tokyo provided a useful starting point. While Japan’s freestanding modernist centerpiece, complete with a shell-like, steel suspension roof, seemed an unrepeatable achievement, Kenzo Tange’s combined venue for the gymnastics and swimming events sparked the imagination.¹¹¹ Taking up the bid’s commitment to spatially compact Games, B+P’s design avoided the inherent monumentality of solitary buildings by bringing the sporting venues close enough to be connected by a common element.

Third, the architects made a virtue of the site’s uneven landscape. In stark contrast to the dramatic vertical landmark of the 291-meter-high television tower—begun in early 1965 before the Games were even considered—the sports venues, including the Olympic stadium itself, would be integrated into existing or freshly accentuated hollows on the Oberwiesenfeld and grouped around the foot of the Schuttberg. B+P took their lead from the so-called earth stadiums, commonly built in Eastern Europe in the interwar and postwar years. Structures such as the sixty-thousand-capacity Śląski Stadium of 1927 had not only proved cost-effective but, when integrated into the hilly landscapes of Katowice, appeared much smaller than their actual size. With the stadium constructed in this way, as Auer once noted, “you don’t walk up to a wall that frightens or haunts you. The main stadium suddenly opens up in front of you like a huge bowl instead of something you have to climb up to.”¹¹⁵ In Munich, moreover, the landscape in which it was embedded would be transformed into an Olympic park, the Schuttberg turned into an Olympic mountain, and the site covered with fresh pasture from the surrounding region to chime with the Alps that were visible from several points within it. Resonant in itself, the landscape’s concealment of the stadium’s technical components enhanced its aesthetic, and—as Carlo Weber put it—”left only the symbolic visible.”¹¹⁶

Despite the margin with which they eventually won, B+P were skeptical about their submission’s chances. Munich in the 1960s was becoming a hotbed of architectural and urban planning debate. Progressive thinking was evenly balanced by the “Heimat groups,” traditionalist citizens’ organizations dedicated to preserving the city’s cultural integrity against the leveling forces of modernity. Associations such as the Bavarian Unification (Bayerische Einigung), the Cultural Circle for the Protection of Munich’s Cityscape and Cultural Legacy (Kulturkreis zum Schutz des Münchener Stadtbildes und Kulturerbes), and the Munich Citizens’ Council (Münchner Burgerrat)—the latter founded in 1968 and boasting some twenty thousand members—maintained close ties to the CSU and the Bayernpartei and gave full and critical voice on architectural matters.¹¹⁷ Moreover, the recent experience of losing the competition to build the city’s Neue Pinakothek gallery had convinced B+P that their design would have stood a better chance in forward-looking Berlin.¹¹⁸ Vogel might have joked to Daume that “Munich is no Bedouin town,” but it was actually the mayor’s intervention that saved the firm from early elimination.¹¹⁹ It also enjoyed the full backing of the jury chair Egon Eiermann. With an impassioned speech at a crucial moment, Eiermann, who built the German pavilion in Brussels and ran the jury that handed the task to Gutbrod and Otto for Montreal,¹²⁰ ensured that the modernist look of West Germany’s representative buildings would continue at the Games.¹²¹

B+P’s influential backers in the OC and beyond eventually won the day, however.¹²⁶ Barely a week after the jury’s initial verdict, Eiermann, a constant champion of the firm’s intentions, addressed Munich’s planning committee and persuaded its members to vote, with only one dissenting voice, in its favor.127 As with Aicher, the Süddeutsche Zeitung advocated the plan at critical junctures,¹²⁸ describing it as “captivating” and hailing the outcome of the competition as “one hundred Olympic ideas but one poetic vision.”¹²⁹ International experts such as New York structural engineers Severud and Associates (who had build the St. Louis Arch) and French architect René Sarger overturned local specialists’ advice, maintaining, with misplaced optimism, that the roof would be less expensive than conventional alternatives.¹³⁰ Vogel and Aicher voiced their support, and Daume lobbied Franz Josef Strauß at national level. In June 1968, six months after winning the competition, B+P were given final permission to proceed.

Over time, the roof would continue to be as controversial as it was stunning. Most conspicuously, the tenfold rise in costs added grist to its detractors’ mill and attracted broad swathes of public opinion to their cause. More surprisingly, however, Frei Otto’s relation to the project gradually soured too. Eiermann had supported B+P’s design as a means of consolidating Otto’s international reputation as a master of light structures, writing to the architect himself in this vein.¹³¹ Otto had publicly supported the company through the period of delays and advised Auer about the technical adaptation of his Montreal designs.¹³² But the common assumption in architectural literature that Otto managed the roof is inaccurate.¹³³ Ultimate responsibility lay with a group of structural engineers under Auer, with Otto, as he freely admitted in a 1973 interview, playing a subordinate role.¹³⁴ Moreover, Otto insinuated somewhat malevolently that B+P had exploited the success of Montreal to win a competition he had decided not to enter himself.¹³⁵ Several factors lie behind the architect’s evident disenchantment. For one, while his Montreal design was intended to provide cost-effective shelter from the continental climate of North America, its Munich equivalent became expensive and, he feared, would deter future clients from employing anyone associated with it. For another, while Montreal represented a temporary solution for a temporary event, Munich—both contributing to, and arising from debates about rising costs—increasingly devoted itself to matters of durability: the semipermanent Plexiglas tiles used on the Oberwiesenfeld pushed it beyond the light membranes and variable materials normally employed in Otto’s designs. And most importantly, Aicher and Behnisch’s appetite for symbolism went against the grain of his philosophy. A strict functionalist, who maintained that a building and its components should be defined exclusively in terms of their practical value, Otto rejected his collaborators’ ”eyeing up eternity.”¹³⁶

It was exactly this symbolic value, however, and the sheer scale of the technical expertise required to create it, that secured the stadium’s place in the affection of the city and nation. Using eight thousand three-by-three-meter Plexiglas tiles to cover almost seventy-five thousand square meters, and holding a roof structure in place with 436 kilometers of steel cables attached to fifty-eight cast-steel pylons, the Munich stadium was the most ambitious building project in the history of the Federal Republic.¹³⁷ Unprecedented as an architectural and engineering feat, it required the help of glaciologists and bacteriologists to determine the likely movement of snow and ice and the impact of fungal growth upon the plastic bearings.¹³⁸

Frei Otto might have been commenting ironically when he mused: “It is a wonder of the world. . . . From the ‘little’ man to the powerful citizen, everyone is proud of this roof.”139 But his sarcasm captures precisely the warmth with which most Germans came to regard the stadium. Initially disgruntled at the rise in costs, Vogel asserted in 1970, for instance, that the Olympic site amounted to only 0.2 percent of the world’s annual expenditure on weapons of mass destruction.¹⁴⁰ And having maintained a discreet silence on matters of local politics after his promotion to national level, the former mayor openly opposed FC Bayern Munich’s plan at the end of the century to convert the stadium into a dedicated soccer arena.¹⁴¹ For Vogel and the majority of public voices thirty years on, B+P’s architecture stood as a unique and unalterable symbol of West Germany’s postwar commitment to peace and democracy.

GÜNTHER GRZIMEK

The same was true of the Olympic Park as a whole, which was shaped by one of the country’s few progressive landscape gardeners of the 1960s, Günther Grzimek (1915–96).142 Taken together, the bid’s promise to deliver “Spiele im Grünen” and B+P’s ambitious designs demanded an innovative relation of buildings to their environs. As the architects noted: “The main idea behind the design [was] the notion of a crafted landscape. The elements that make up a landscape [were] superordinate in significance. The roof [was] to protect parts of this landscape, while the landscape [was] to flow underneath it.”¹⁴³ Grzimek was well placed to master the task: a close colleague of Aicher’s, he had become Director of the Garten- und Friedhofsamt of the city of Ulm in the late 1940s,¹⁴⁴ served as a member of the advisory board of the College of Design,¹⁴⁵ and collaborated successfully with Behnisch on the city’s School of Engineering in 1963.¹⁴⁶ Working in tandem with B+P’s Carlo Weber, Grzimek breathed the spirit of Aicher across the Olympic site.

A functionalist, like Aicher, who eschewed ornamentation and the ethereal claims of grand art, Grzimek devoted his career to humanizing the everyday experience of individuals in modern industrial society.¹⁴⁷ Using the natural environment to provide physical and mental recuperation from the pressures of life, Grzimek’s parks offered contrasting spaces for privacy and openness, movement and rest.¹⁴⁸ His work typically molded robust green idylls from a panoply of natural elements: mountains, hills, valleys, slopes, ridges, plains, water, marshland, lawns, meadows, trees, groves, and bushes.¹⁴⁹ Curved naturally around its existing gentle contours, the Oberwiesenfeld nonetheless presented Grzimek and the B+P team with a tabula rasa from which new life could take shape. The creation of an entirely fresh 14.4 square-kilometer landscape (Gelandemodellierung) involved moving some 2.2 million cubic meters of earth, including 350,000 cubic meters of soil for forty tons of grass seed, 3,100 large trees and thousands of smaller varieties and shrubs.¹⁵⁰ The result was a space of flexible and multiple possibilities for groups and individuals alike.¹⁵¹

But like Aicher, there was an important political dimension to Grzimek’s thinking too—Munich’s new park being designed to create a utopia in which the city’s visitors and inhabitants could interact and communicate across social and linguistic barriers. It represented, as he noted shortly before his death in 1996, “an object of use for a democratic society,” or even, as he suggested in 1973, the very zenith of democratization.¹⁵² Completing a series of city spaces stretching back through the bourgeois park of the eighteenth-century English Garden to the absolutism of the seventeenth-century Nymphenburg Palace, the Oberwiesenfeld of 1972 presented a model of open access and participation.¹⁵³ Although less Hegelian in its original concept—B+P playing it safe in 1967 with Greek antiquity as their major frame of reference—the site offered a physical conceit to Grzimek’s teleology.154 A small stream transected the terrain and was dammed up to form a symbolically resonant lake at the heart of the site. Running from the English Garden it formed part of the Nymphenburg Channel and provided a physical connection to the nearby city center and its historical development from absolutism to democracy.¹⁵⁵

Yet Grzimek’s landscape sought not simply to convey democracy but to liberalize it as well. His Olympic Park—in keeping with Aicher’s views and ideas about participatory democracy—intended to “loosen the constraints of social relations and produce freer, more ‘playful’ forms of communication.”¹⁵⁶ Translated into the green environment, this meant that visitors were conspicuously invited to walk on the grass and pick the flowers. Notices announced, “Please walk on the grass!”¹⁵⁷ Although in retrospect somewhat contrived, these ideas were ahead of their time: another decade would pass before Grzimek could entitle a book The Appropriation of the Meadow and the relaxing of boundaries between paths and lawns became the norm in public spaces.¹⁵⁸

Aesthetically, as well as politically and philosophically, the undulating landscape of the Oberwiesenfeld, which invited visitors to relax within a fluid harmony of natural and architectural elements, stood in stark contrast to the Olympic venues of 1936. These had been created, in fact, by Grzimek’s teacher Heinrich Wiepking,¹⁵⁹ a leading figure in German landscape gardening before the war who, as an official in Himmler’s Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of Germandom, suggested the draining of the Soviet Pripet marshes to create “German peasant land” (deutsches Bauernland).¹⁶⁰ Wiepking’s Reichssportfeld sought to generate feelings of awe and admiration, and did so largely by allowing architecture to dominate nature: a large plateau of trimmed geometric lawns separated by ample avenues gave little natural coverage, save for trees and shrubs planted in neat rows, and the gaze of arriving spectators panned naturally along these axes to the stadium rising imposingly in front of them. On three sides, however, artificially created woods linked with already existing parklands in the south to transmit subtle messages about the German nation. As in his other 1936 commission—the wooded parkland of the Olympic village at Döberitz just outside Berlin—Wiepking sought to overcome the disjuncture between Volk and nature in modern civilization and urban life. In keeping with the cultural pessimism of the time, he aimed to heal the “sick city-dweller” (kranker Stadtmensch) with a return to German “soil” (Mutterboden).¹⁶¹ To this end, large poplars, seventy-year-old oaks, and thousands of white beeches, birches, larch-trees, and other local species were planted around the edges of the Reichssportfeld to create the illusion of ancient German parklands.¹⁶² In the Olympic village, the water course was lowered by seven meters to give the impression of a natural continuation with the landscape.¹⁶³

Wiepking might have believed that “the spirit and energies of the human races are distinguished from each other in the landscape with the sharpness of a knife,” as he put it in the official SS newspaper Das schwarze Korps in 1944.164 But Munich’s landscape architect had little qualms about following his techniques. Just as Aicher had drawn his own conclusions about the power of the Nazis’ corporate design in 1936, so too his close collaborator employed a similar strategy when dealing with the Olympic Park. Unlike his early mentor, of course, Grzimek wished to affirm, not reject, modernity, and sought not so much to provide an escape from city life as to integrate the park into the heart of the city.¹⁶⁵ This was achieved by planting lime trees, familiar from Munich’s boulevards, along the pathways that transected it. To optimize their natural appearance, they were arranged—albeit via the minute accuracy of a draftsman’s grid—in irregular patterns.¹⁶⁶ A similar illusion was employed on the rubble mountain, another obvious connection between the park and the city. Elevated from fifty to sixty-three meters with earth excavated from the construction of the stadium, the Schuttberg was lent an even more imposing air by the planting of dwarf pines and oaks, cut specially to size to accentuate the height of its naked peak.¹⁶⁷

PROBLEMS

Aicher, Behnisch, and Grzimek worked in harmony of purpose, their close cooperation throughout protecting a shared and all-encompassing aesthetic vision. On the whole, they did so with the overwhelming support of the committee, but on the few occasions their concept appeared to be compromised, they refuted alternative suggestions with unwavering severity. In two instances in particular, they crossed swords with powerful local interests in debates that opened out onto sensitive issues of regional and national identity. The first related to beer and Bavaria, the second to monuments and the memory of war.

Unlike the PR department, which exploited the outside world’s positive image of Bavarian traditions, Aicher remained circumspect about the region’s peculiarities. While Klein’s team, intent on maximizing the Games’ appeal to key tourist audiences, advertised the delights of imbibing the city’s favorite drink, Aicher cautioned against over-indulgence.¹⁶⁸ In a critical paper delivered to the committee for visual design in 1967, he included the Germans’ fondness for beer-fuelled sociability in a list of negative stereotypes the organizers should aspire to overcome: “Over-organization, emotive self-presentation, demanding to be recognized as a major power, military nationalism, intensification of the Cold War, beer-fuelled German Gemütlichkeit, sauerkraut and Beethoven, demonstration of national sporting prowess.”¹⁶⁹

Aicher’s vision and the advertisers’ slogans could work in tandem, of course—the one shaped the Games, the other, a means to an end, simply ensured that enough visitors came to appreciate them. When beer and Bavaria impinged on Aicher’s design, however, trouble quickly ensued. When budgetary cuts forced the organizers to sell permission to local breweries to erect a series of beer tents on the site, Aicher responded, typically, by tendering his resignation and preparing a strongly worded statement for the press.¹⁷² Held to ransom by its chief designer, the OC had to renege and the food-and-drink industry was pushed to the margins, in two tents at the southern tip of the park.¹⁷³ Even then, Aicher refused to make the food and drink practical for customers and objected to signs that advertised their location. The companies involved lost considerable sums, which eventually cost the committee some DM 350,000 in an out-of-court settlement.¹⁷⁴

Aesthetic integrity was at the heart of another more public controversy surrounding the Olympic site in 1970 and 1971. In the spring of 1967, several months before the conclusion of the architectural competition, Vogel and Hohenemser had chosen the top of the rubble mountain as a fitting location for a monument commemorating the first atomic bomb. Stemming from the mayor’s original idea to erect a Hiroshima fountain or equivalent in the city on the twentieth anniversary of 6 August 1945, the plan had secured funding from the city hall and the German Trade Union Congress (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB), and gone into commission with Richard Belling (1886–1972), a surviving member of the Weimar avant-garde. The awarding of the Games to the city lent particular poignancy to the gesture, Vogel seeing an opportunity to connect the city’s own former destruction with a monument that would “place a certain accent on the Olympic site, warn competitors and visitors of the unavoidable horrors of nuclear war, and encourage peace.”¹⁷⁵ Behnisch begged to differ, however, and vigorously opposed both the form of Belling’s Schuttblume (Rubble Flower) and the position in which the city proposed to place it. Producing “a series of contorted, intertwined curvilinear shapes that unfolded organically from a narrow stem at its base,” the “rough, metal form hint[ing] at the tons of buried metal and rubble from which it sprang,”176 Belling seemed over the hill to Behnisch.¹⁷⁷ (He would in fact die a few months before the Games.) Neither, in Behnisch’s view, did the artist belong on top of the hill: not only would the size of his sculpture (eventually reduced from twelve to six meters) gain disproportional prominence on the site, but it would also destroy the illusion of height that Grzimek and Behnisch had built into the rubble mountain. Most importantly, the architects’ shaping of the hill into a new sculpture in its own right defied the placing of a rival object on its crown. “The entire mound,” as Behnisch never tired of arguing, was “a sculpture,”¹⁷⁸ and “drawing attention to it via other aesthetic means,” as Aicher added, “contradicted the ideology of the site as a whole.”¹⁷⁹

Vogel, Munich City Hall, and the trade unions proved harder to defeat than the local catering industries, however, and Daume, as usual, had to broker an uneasy compromise. After protracted negotiations, the monument was placed twenty-five meters south of the mountain’s eastern ridge, in a position where it could not be seen from the main venues.¹⁸⁰ Rarely defeated, Vogel retaliated by blocking Behnisch’s alternative for the top of the hill—a “negative sculpture” in the form of a hole, three meters in diameter, drilled 120 meters into the earth and topped with a bronze disk. American artist Walter de Maria’s Thought Hole (Denkloch), which Behnisch championed as “articulating the art of the age,”¹⁸¹ represented the perfect complement to the park’s carefully constructed landscape: “a monumental work that nonetheless didn’t scream monument in your face.”¹⁸² Despite supporting statements from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the German art establishment, and experts from around the world, this piece of “non-architecture” proved one step too far for the city administration, the conservative local press, and Bavarian representatives on the OC and the OBG.¹⁸³ Even Brandt expressed incredulity.¹⁸⁴ After six months’ debate, the Denkloch was shelved—officially due to estimated costs of DM 1.5 million—and Vogel paid Behnisch back with a share of his own disappointment.¹⁸⁵

CEREMONIES

The most important event to take place in the Olympic Stadium was, of course, the opening ceremony. As Vogel noted at the start of the torch relay in Olympia, this was—and remains—ihe only regular moment in history when almost the whole of humanity gathered (virtually) in an act of common celebration. After six years of planning and packaging, the Federal Republic would be granted two hours in which to impress itself on a captive worldwide audience of up to one billion viewers. Despite the Olympic Charter’s strict attention to details, such as the lighting of the flame or the swearing of oaths and playing of anthems, local organizers enjoyed sufficient latitude to inflect these rituals, or at least the setting in which they unfolded, with their own particular vision.186 Although the 1972 official report later emphasized a lack of room for maneuver in the IOC’s statutes,¹⁸⁷ the opening ceremony in Munich stands out, along with those of 1932 and 1936 and later the Hollywood spectacular of Los Angeles 1984, as the most innovative in Olympic history.¹⁸⁸

Recent experience gave the Munich team much to consider but little to go on, however. In the early 1960s, Carl Diem had organized a ceremony to celebrate the completion of the West German–sponsored dig at Olympia, an extension of Hitler’s excavations from 1936 through 1941. The official handover to the Greeks offered Diem a touchstone with Olympic history, quite literally, as he would be in eager attendance when the memorial pillar encasing de Coubertin’s heart was moved to a new resting place within the site.¹⁸⁹ Asserting Germany’s inalienable right to a large share of the Olympic ideal, he set about organizing an event for representatives of one hundred National Olympic Committees and twenty-five international sports federations in 1961, at which gymnastic displays by one hundred German and one hundred Greek students would be followed by the joint performance of a Greek folk dance, a 400-meter race run by the top six placed athletes over the distance from the Rome Olympics, readings from Pindar, and a lecture by Swiss professor Carl Jacob Burckhardt.¹⁹⁰ Despite inviting Burckhardt to lighten the Teutonic tone, the proceedings represented one of the final, unadulterated acts of the “German Olympic imagination.” Diem consulted music experts about playing the fanfare from the 1936 Games, either unnamed or transformed into a new composition, and strove above all to achieve a “simple, monumental form.”¹⁹¹

The recent Olympics set equally inappropriate precedents for Munich too. Although the modesty of Helsinki 1952 (“an unforgettably dignified celebration”), the “open-air massed display” choreographed by Walt Disney for the Winter Games in Squaw Valley 1960, and the releasing of ten thousand balloons by schoolchildren at Tokyo 1964 pointed Munich’s organizers in the right direction, opening ceremonies by and large lived off pomp and pathos.¹⁹² Just years before Munich began planning, Rome and Tokyo had regressed toward the magnitude of Berlin, with an “overwhelming musical program of gigantic choirs” and “blaring military bands,” and the 1968 Games did little to change the tone.¹⁹³

Daume hardly needed Vogel’s prompt, having begun to think about the Munich opening almost two years before Mexico. In that time, he had made excellent progress toward reinvigorating Olympic rituals for a modern audience. Meeting three times between January 1967 and March 1968, a working party (“Sport and Culture”) of the DSB had set itself the goal of making Munich “a break with tradition that [would] lead the way for future Games.”¹⁹⁷ Despite some mustiness—Daume still harbored hopes of inviting Nobel Prize winners to deliver lectures in the Olympic Stadium (like Sven Hedin in Berlin)—the group worked with progressive zeal toward articulating the bid’s major pledges in ceremonial form. (Two years later, they would describe the arts program as “hopelessly outdated.”)¹⁹⁸ Werner Körbs, Rector of the Deutsche Sporthochschule in Cologne, led the way, critiquing his predecessor Diem and stressing the need “to be modern and in touch with the times.” Guido von Mengden, a leading member of Diem’s original team who had managed, successfully if not uncontroversially, to rehabilitate himself under Daume’s patronage in the Federal Republic (see chapter 3), agreed that “the cultural program could only consist of those Olympic ideas that retained some value in the world of today.” And Kai Braak, senior producer at the Hess-isches Staatstheater, argued, with one eye on the recent resurgence of the right-wing NPD, that the “Olympics [would] have to be decidedly anti-nationalistic (even anti-national).” The central ideas and phrases from these early meetings—“openness to the future,” “cheerful playfulness”—would function as leitmotifs over the following years.

By early 1968, the parameters had already been set. Treading gingerly around elements of a nationalistic or militaristic nature, the ceremony was to be characterized by “traditional values adapted to the present,” the “cheerfulness and joy of play,” and “stripped of inappropriate pathos and pseudo-sacred elements that no longer sport to the youth of the [time].”¹⁹⁹ Although tame for the spirit of the age (see chapter 5), such ideas were revolutionary in Olympic circles, as evidenced by the reaction of the Greek NOC, to whom the words just cited were addressed. Asked by Daume in 1971 to remold aspects of the flame-lighting ceremony in Olympia in order to bring the tradition in-line with the forthcoming event in Munich, the Greeks took a year to reply and ultimately declined to alter a well-worn script that included a high priestess’s prayer to Zeus.²⁰⁰ But in Munich, plans for modernization met largely with unanimity as a series of committees and subcommittees were convened over several years under Daume’s watchful eye. While it is neither possible nor desirable to detail every discussion here, it can safely be said that the opening ceremony in Munich was the product of broad cooperation and consensus.²⁰¹ On the whole, this process was built around interlocking and overlapping groups, working with a well-grounded understanding of what needed to emerge. Vitally, the tone was set not by national politicians or high-ranking artists, but by members of the national sports body seeking to bring Olympic protocol up to speed with the modern world. Conveniently, their deliberations harmonized perfectly with the overall strategy for the Games, and their early conclusions dovetailed with the established working processes of the OC. The DSB’s recommendations fed into the arts committee, which in turn invited Guido von Mengden to give a paper.²⁰² With the board’s blessing, a further group was established to concentrate on the ceremonial aspect of the Games (Working Party on the Opening and Closing Ceremonies), and was numerically and vocally dominated by the West German sports community.²⁰³ Walter Umminger—not yet disgraced by the Olympisches Lesebuch—took the reigns from von Mengden.²⁰⁴ Along with authors Günter Grass and Reinhard Raffalt and architect Paulo Nestler, Franz Baur-Pantoulier advised on choreography and was later joined on music by Wilhelm Killmayer, a former student of Carl Orff who was noted for his “rhythmic energy,” “ingenious insights” and “fresh, innovative formulations.”²⁰⁵

Although largely in agreement with the subcommittee’s decisions, Killmayer found himself restricted by the agenda it had set itself, confiding to a colleague shortly after his appointment in 1970: “I don’t have it easy here. A lot seems to have been decided already and everyone is trying hard, at all costs, to avoid causing offense.”²⁰⁶ His initial disquiet was certainly symptomatic of a broader unease about musicians. On the one hand, Daume hardly quailed at the compromised careers of established composers: in one of his first major articles on the Munich Games, he praised Richard Strauß’s “musically outstanding Olympic hymn” from 1936, hoping that it might be played for the first time again in Mexico; and he valued Carl Orff and his pupil Werner Egk, who had assumed prominent roles under National Socialism (including Diem’s Festspiel), but emerged largely unscathed in the new Republic.²⁰⁷ On the other, he was wary of the music fraternity’s reluctance to engage with the more popular feel the Munich festival hoped to engender. Meetings of composers and a regular working party on music (Arbeits kreis Musik), which included Orff, Egk, and von Karajan, pleaded strongly for national participation, a competition to commission “serious music,” and the retention of de Coubertin’s favorite classical melody, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which they envisaged performing with three Munich orchestras.208 Daume played the musicians as he did the IOC with regard to the arts festival, allowing them to continue their deliberations while pushing ahead himself with the other committees and sending interim reports directly to the board. Given the large number of sports representatives at this highest level, he met with little resistance. Other colleagues, moreover, did not share his magnanimous attitude to the previous lives of certain composers. When it came to advertising an open competition for a new Olympic fanfare, a process, Daume argued, that should “minimize the intellectual side of things,”²⁰⁹ the organizers considered placing an age limit of forty or requiring entrants to give their date of birth to prevent it being won by a “composer with an incriminating past.”²¹⁰ (In the end, a fifty-strong jury on the weekly Second German Television sports program Aktuelles Sportstudio selected an erstwhile close collaborator of Bert Kaempfert, Herbert Rehbein, who later had to defend himself against the charge of plagiarizing the U.S. group Fifth Dimension’s 1968 hit “Up, up and away.”) Unlike design elites, therefore, who confected the look of the Games largely uncontested, music elites were treated with suspicion. Highbrow sounds were welcome and encouraged in the concert hall but not in the stadium, and dubious pasts could potentially cause international embarrassment.

“Easy and melodic,” an “expression of middle-of-the road German tastes,” Rehbein’s winning fanfare was perfectly in tune with the score for the opening ceremony.²¹¹ In principle, as the organizers decided at an early stage, Munich would overwrite the customary texture of the event with something akin to a “musical.” Less operatic and militaristic, it would be “natural,” “swaying,” and “optimally integrated with the visual elements” of Aicher and Behnisch’s design and architecture.²¹² In practice, the organizers would need to apply for certain changes in regulation at the IOC and then drown out any elements that proved nonnegotiable with the exuberance of their own show. Their twofold approach was largely successful. Aicher’s plan to break up the static blocks of parading teams by splitting them into spirals in the stadium field as well as his desire to rid the ceremony of doves were rejected by Lausanne. But many innovations made it off the drawing board.²¹³ Gun salutes were used more sparingly than in Mexico and cannon fire avoided altogether; President Heinemann would have been greeted by alpenhorn players had his early arrival not taken them unawares and prompted the playing of the national anthem; the last leg of the relay was completed by a little-known eighteen-year-old German athlete (Günter Zahn) in pristine white, supported by four international Olympians;²¹⁴ the oath was sworn for the first time by a young female athlete; the second rendition of the national anthem, which traditionally followed it, dropped; the great bell, a 1936 feature that had found its way into the architectural competition and the OBG’s considerations for some time,215 was replaced by a Dutch-manufactured Glockenspiel that entertained crowds arriving at the stadium with easy-listening classics such as “Kalinka,” “Jingle Bells,” and the German Volkslied “Muß I denn,” sung around the time by Elvis Presley; and the program ended with Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki’s specially commissioned electronic version of Pindar’s “Olympic Truce.” Bookended, thus, by different shades of modernity and international reconciliation, the ceremony featured a performance by some 2,800 brightly clad Munich schoolchildren dancing in circles to a new Carl Orff setting of the Middle English “Sumer is icumen in” and “spontaneously” handing their toy bows and posies to the nearest athletes.²¹⁶ Nothing could have been further from the bombastic formalism of 1936 or the Eastern bloc’s formidably drilled gymnastics displays, a comparison Daume had feared in the early stages of planning.²¹⁷

As Orff’s participation shows, the country’s serious composers were not entirely neglected, even those who had contributed significantly to 1936. (Egk was also invited to write a version of the Olympic hymn but declined.)²¹⁸ But the overall sound of the event, determined by the melodies that accompanied the lengthy parade of nations, came from a different quarter. Realizing the need to lighten the tone, Killmayer approached Alfred Goodmann, an American living in Germany with a wealth of experience in the development of the modern music scene.²¹⁹ Goodmann sifted through North American college songs, musical hits, and melodies from Latin America, discarding tunes with political connotations, until Daume chose to contact Kurt Edelhagen, the leader of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk’s eponymous “Light Orchestra,” and was immediately wooed, not least by the station’s willingness to cover costs. On hearing the news of Daume’s independent actions, the working party on music threatened to resign en masse, but the OC president held his ground, winning his closest colleagues over to the notion that “the sound rather than the melody [was] the key” and that Edelhagen’s musicians delivered “the [decisive] elements of color, rhythm, and cheerful play.”²²⁰ Plundering Goodmann’s groundwork, three members of Edelhagen’s band wrote “American swing” with a “subliminal effect,” and on 26 August 1972, the conductor and a selection from his orchestra, dressed in Aicher’s Olympic sky blue, provided the defining sound of the Games.²²¹ As the nations came in, they heard their national styles and characteristics gently stereotyped: Turkey to “Turkish Delight,” Hungary to “Gypsy Love,” Cuba to “Habana alegre.” Edelhagen’s light jazz and swing hardly caught the beat of the contemporary hit parade, nor did it reach the dizzying heights of Aicher and Behnisch’s internationally renown design. It was, rather, a version of what middle-aged, middle-class men thought would appeal to the younger generation. (Daume’s heart lay in an unrealized three-week festival, “The Most Popular Songs of the World,” with Frank Sinatra, Bert Kaempfert, and Mireille Mathieu.)²²² Nonetheless, it made massive strides in Olympic history and was readily accepted and praised as an integral part of the Games’ fabric.

As with the design concept, however, certain Bavarian elements proved difficult to integrate. One reason for this was the chance employment of Edelhagen. From an early stage, the organizers had thought it desirable to include local folklore as a way of lightening the rituals, suggesting even that Egk might modernize suitable music from the region.223 The working party on music had considered “profiling Bavarian folk music” and intended to discuss “involving traditional Bavarian groups” with the OC when Edelhagen was appointed without prior warning. Personal pique aside, their major objection to the light entertainment concerned “the complete withdrawal” of folkloric elements from it, and despite the backing of the Bavarian Ministry of Education and Culture, which pleaded the Land’s case with Daume, their worst fears were realized.²²⁴ Apart from the unfortunate alpine horns, the only overtly Bavarian aspect in the final script came from the Vereinigte Bayerische Trachtenkapelle aus Bernau und Ruhpolding and a group of Peitschenknaller (or “Goaßlschnalzer”) which played and danced along with Mexican mariachis as the Olympic flag was passed from one mayor to the other. But even these had been controversial. The Trachtenkapelle had been inserted after Vogel, normally so willing to embrace Bavarian tradition, had objected to the participation of another traditional group, the Stadtpfeifer. When Vogel continued, without public explanation, to protest against the Peitschenknaller as well, choreographer Baur-Pantoulier sought support from confidants. August Everding (Intendant der Münchener Kammerspiele) speculated that the mayor might have misconstrued the whipping as a violent act, and author Reinhard Raffalt wondered if he harbored some strange association with concentration camps.²²⁵ Neither of them—like Carl Orff who offered to raise the matter with him personally—shared the mayor’s reservations, and the Peitschenknaller eventually made it into the stadium.

Given Vogel’s continued refusal to discuss the issue, it is impossible to test his contemporaries’ interpretations.²²⁶ Even if motivated by concerns about personal image or professional ambition, the mayor’s reluctance to surround himself with whipping and whistling points again to a residual aesthetic embarrassment about Bavaria’s backward and/or militaristic image: at the 1958 World Fair, the Foreign Office had been sensitive about the adverse effect a Bavarian beer tent playing marching music could have on international audiences.²²⁷ Certainly, both Bavaria and the Bundeswehr took a backseat in the opening ceremony. The Olympic flag was entrusted to the West German gold-medal-winning rowing team from Mexico City, and the band of the Bundeswehr only played the short Olympic fanfare. Nonetheless, early fears in the Ministry of the Interior that “excluding the army from its traditional role on the very first occasion the Games were being held in federal territory [would] hinder its integration into society” proved exaggerated.²²⁸ The army, without whose help no Olympics of the era could have functioned, was subtly but definitely visible throughout the Games. Quite apart from their massive contribution to the logistics of infrastructure and transport, soldiers accompanied hostesses to medal ceremonies and raised the flag for the victors. Dressed not in the standard, stylized Dirndl but in traditional varieties, chosen specially to reflect the diversity and customs of the region, attractive young ladies joined uniformed representatives of the national army, in outlying locations and in the Olympic stadium itself, to celebrate the ceremonial aspect of the Games at the end of each competition.²²⁹ Bavaria and the Bundeswehr were not denied their rights in Munich. But at the opening ceremony, the single most important moment of the whole endeavor, their input was minimized.

For years Willi Daume has been promising everyone, the youth of the world included, cheerful Games. To do that took as much courage as it did to build the crazy roof, since, as we know, we don’t do light-heartedness very well. The least skeptical response his plans provoked was: “That sounds great.” [Das kann ja heiter werden.] Which can mean a lot of things in our language. And now, against all expectations, he has succeeded. . . . No—you have to hand it to Daume: he pulled it off. And if it wasn’t good enough for some people, we’d have to say—we don’t do more cheerful!230

The contrast to Bonn’s drab and worthy plans for Montreal 1967 could not have been greater, and politicians of all political hues (Genscher, Barzel, Kiesinger, Scheel) lined up to give euphoric sound-bites. Josef Neckermann confessed, “I didn’t believe it was possible—but it really impressed me,” and an Olympic hostess called Brigitte Maibohm, whose husband had delivered the radio commentary for the 1936 Games, simply dissolved in tears. Even potential cynics concurred. Eberhard Vogel, an East German soccer player and bronze-medal winner from the Tokyo Olympics remarked, “It was overwhelming. . . . It gave me a really warm feeling,” and Richard Mandell, whose scholarly monograph on 1936 had only recently been published, confessed to being overcome with emotion against his better judgment.²³¹ The architectural ensemble and light-touch performances had achieved their desired effect. An Australian sailing competitor noted: “What host nation can better that in future?” Ludwig Erhard simply stated: “I’m glad today that I said yes to Munich’s application in 1965.”²³² And Willy Brandt, the beneficiary of his foresight, was grateful that the world had seen a “bit of ‘modern Germany.’ ”²³³

4

Germany on the Drawing Board