On the penultimate day of the Games, twelve hundred guests—including the International Olympic Committee (IOC), its outgoing and incoming presidents (Brundage and Killanin), and German politicians Heinemann, Brandt, and Goppel—had been expected at the Lenbachhaus gallery for an evening of champagne and sparkling conversation. But the terrorist attack several days before leadened the mood, and civic hospitality was cancelled as a mark of respect. Now extended by one day, the Games offered little joy or levity, as delegates, dignitaries, and athletes waited for a scaled-down closing ceremony before leaving Munich to its troubled Olympic legacy. When press officer Camillo Noel had delivered his text for the event on the eve of the Games to Vogel’s successor, Mayor Georg Kronawitter, he could scarcely have imagined the irony of his words. Despite the excitement of the opening week, no one could have returned home with an overwhelming sense that “the examples of our ability to understand one another, to make friends and maintain peace” had proved “stronger than the risk of conflict and contestation.”1
Kronawitter’s aborted speech, which took in the international context of the Games and their potential hard and soft legacies for Germany, Munich, and the Olympic movement, nonetheless serves as a convenient frame to conclude our discussion of the Games, their making and significance. Certainly, as this book has shown, the Munich Olympics were “caught up in the currents of power and conflict in human society.” They were caught, like the Federal Republic generally in the 1960s, between past and future. Indebted to, but emerging from the pathos of a nineteenth-century tradition, they were enabled by technocratic optimism and shaped by the futuristic rationality of the early computer age. Buffeted by student protest, they struggled to respond to radical youth demands while remaining faithful to the nonpolitical nature of the Games and the easygoing mood of its mainstream visitors. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), they had a rival that exploited the Olympic movement to make quasipolitical gains that were inaccessible through normal diplomacy, but who approached the Munich event with thinly veiled enmity. That rival, however, had Brandt’s rapprochement with the East to contend with, and ultimately the Soviet Union’s strategic decisions within a complicated process of international relations. The West German authorities came up against forces beyond their own control too, when Palestinian terrorists interrupted the Games and threw their Middle Eastern initiatives out of kilter. Each of these currents moved at different speeds, at different times, and impacted on different aspects of the Games.
But these were only the external forces. As Johannes Paulmann—who has done much to advance the study of international representation—recently noted, “the inner dimensions of West German cultural diplomacy have so far not been studied adequately,” and these must be considered here too.2 Without wishing to reduce the often complex currents and influences presented in this book, it is worth noting the most significant factors in the inner evolution of the Munich event. First, there is the relation between individuals and collectives. On the one hand, despite the turmoil of 1967 through 1969, the Games would have been impossible without the deideologization that characterized the main political parties of the 1960s and allowed them to proceed invariably with unity of purpose. In the combined support of city, Land, and nation, they profited moreover from the centrist orientation of the Republic and its “cooperative federalism.”3 Yet, individuals held the upper hand. Without Daume’s initiative, Vogel’s determination, and both men’s ambition, West Germany would not have contemplated hosting the Olympics at all. And without their steely resolve to produce the Games they wanted—variously for German sport, the Olympic movement, Munich, and the Federal Republic—the contours of the event would doubtless have developed differently. Echoing earlier complaints by Prince Georg von Opel, a West German IOC member who felt excluded by the closed and “cliquey” nature of the Organizing Committee (OC),4 an internal Foreign Office report expressed irritation at the degree of autonomy enjoyed by the organizers—namely, “foreign partners could hardly believe that the federal government had practically zero influence on the OC.”5 Despite the factual inaccuracy of this statement—Bonn, like Bavaria and Munich, had significant representation on the executive board of the OC—it captures the essence of the enterprise. For, with Daume’s vision and Vogel’s blessing, selected representatives of the architectural, design, and PR elites that had constructed and projected the Federal Republic’s image in the 1950s and 1960s formed a tight-knit group in Munich. Daume, as the OC’s minute taker aptly concluded, was “a nutter, but an ingenious nutter.”6 It was his team’s look, and the freedom to produce it without interference, that allowed the Games to speak to their times.
Second, there is the relation between the hosts and their chief guests, the IOC. Kronawitter might have cited the “Olympic Law” of ultimate sacrifice in easy conjunction with the endeavors of the city, but the Germans’ engagement with a high-profile, outmoded, powerful, and self-deluded international body was far from easy. As Noel noted when sending Kronawitter his draft: “I have used my close knowledge of how things work in the Olympics to balance the content of the speech carefully and avoid any sort of pathos,” warning nonetheless that “the subject matter [was] difficult.”7 Involvement with the strongly traditional IOC inevitably reopened a previous event that the organizers wished at once to forget and transcend. It was not simply that a veneration of the 1936 Games encouraged fringe members of the West German sports fraternity to vocalize their “Olympic imagination” at inappropriate moments, but that it contributed to Munich’s selection in the first place and lurked unspoken in expectations (good and bad) around the world. Brundage, the biggest fan of a Germany that no longer existed, became an increasingly loose cannon, and Daume’s expert knowledge and cunning was needed to negotiate the committees and corridors of the IOC. Yet at the same time, as governments of every political persuasion quickly appreciate—from Berlin to Moscow, Los Angeles to Beijing—Olympism is an open creed that permits the hosts to appropriate and radiate positive messages about themselves to unprecedented audiences across the globe. The fallacy of sport’s assumed neutrality was its most powerful tool—one that generally worked well for the organizers except when turned upon them by Black September or the GDR.
And third, there was the relation between sport and political discourses in general. The (semi-)autonomous dynamic of sport could generate counterintuitive, even contradictory alignments. Jesse Owens’s and the Israeli NOC’s agreement with Brundage over respective boycott movements in the late 1960s and 1972 are prominent cases in point. But in Munich, despite the New Left’s critique, sport harmonized well with pressing themes of the time in a series of ideological serendipities. While Daume opposed “gigantism” and kept Munich modest because of the IOC’s aversion to the scale of Rome, Tokyo, and Mexico City, his attitude chimed with the rejection of the concept in postwar German architecture and helped ease the Games away from their infamous Berlin predecessor. An IOC keen to expand and trumpet its magnitude would have caused the organizers considerable problems. By the same token, Daume’s long-held desire to democratize sport and his fixation with Huizinga’s notions of play fitted neatly with the progressive mood of the era. Aicher, Behnisch, Grzimek, and Ruhnau found ready points of contact with the OC president, and translated the broader reform discourse of democracy, freedom, and participation that marked the Federal Republic—even before its radicalization in 1968—into the Olympic landscape. And finally, in terms of aesthetic disposition, Daume’s visual imagination met its perfect match in Aicher, who believed that trust and understanding developed from perception. Throughout the Olympic project, images, graphics, pictures, and material forms proved more effective than words.
Showing rather than telling had been the Federal Republic’s modus operandi since the 1950s. Despite a strong belief in West German achievement, the exhibit at the Brussels World Fair of 1958 was marked by an “attitude of restraint” (Haltung der Zurückhaltung) and, “avoiding open propaganda and politics,” used “architecture and things, rather than many words to make its point.”8 Bonn’s conscious moderation continued through the 1960s—and, as Paulmann argues, still holds almost twenty years into the Berlin Republic.9 In 1963, unsettling events such as the Nazi trials and the erection of the Berlin Wall caused the government to delay ten months before considering an invitation to participate at the next expo in Montreal, and the social tensions that gathered pace from the middle of the decade hardly encouraged them to let loose when 1967 arrived.10 In the Canadian metropolis, Gutbrod and Otto’s stunning architecture diminished the significance of the pavilion’s content, but most importantly gave a sense of increased German confidence. Despite the desire to produce “an unconventional Germany” rather than a “German drama,” national and international audiences perceived a clear development from the “sympathetic but all-too-obvious attempt to reestablish [the country] internationally” in Brussels to the “Swinging Germany” of Montreal.11 The effect—initially unintended, as Sigel notes, but later seized upon as cultural capital—was magnified in Munich.12 That is not to say that all caution was thrown to the wind in 1972. The Munich City Council fretted about the international custom for track-and-field judges to march into the stadium;13 at the opening ceremony, Kurt Edelhagen scrupulously vetted tunes that were featured in 1936;14 and the national anthem was played, not sung, while a simple “Welcome to Munich” replaced the words “Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit” (unity, justice, freedom) on the scoreboard.15 But the transformation of Otto’s temporary and flexible solution to a specific architectural conundrum in Canada into—as he later sardonically noted—an “artificial form” and “Olympic rhapsody”16 of permanent symbolism marks the high point of “modest” self-imaging in the history of the Bonn Republic.
Certainly, the FIFA soccer World Cup of 1974, which West Germany hosted and eventually won against Holland in Munich’s Olympic Stadium, had a very different look. World Cups have never shared the Olympics’ enthusiasm for symbols, and the soccer event appeared as primitive as the Mexico 1970 tournament did compared to its own Olympic predecessor of 1968.17 But by the mid-1970s, it was the Munich Games, not their poor soccer relations, that formed the exception. After the late summer of 1972, Brandt won the Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) biggest mandate in the Bundestag but was later forced to resign; the consequences of Black September’s attack for the security of megaevents were being realized for the first time against a backdrop of increased activity from the second generation of Red Army Faction commandoes; and in 1973, the OPEC (oil) crisis sent a dramatic shock through the world system. As Ulrich Pfeil recently observed: “There was nothing left of the ‘dynamic times’ of the long 1960s. . . . [There was] a sense of modernity and a striving for technocratic feasibility, but a ‘change of direction’ had already occurred and was questioning the euphoria of modernization. International terrorism, as well as an increasing awareness of the ‘limits of growth’ had demonstrated the vulnerability of Western industrial society.”18
Thirty years earlier, Vogel reached a similar verdict in his closing remarks to the final meeting of OC members (Mitgliederversammlung) in 1977: “I’m not so certain . . . whether [the whole preparation of the Games] would work the same way under the conditions we face today, whether we would be able to bring everyone together under one roof with the same purpose.”19
Thus, the Munich Games capture a moment.20 They were the culmination of “the long 1960s”: faith in planning, belief in modernity, and the desire to reform and democratize all levels of human activity. But, as this book has demonstrated, while they expressed social changes and political discourse, they far from simply reflected them. Taking 2,247 days to prepare and 1,758 to tidy up, they contested and constructed the spirit of the age as much as they accepted it.21 Lasting sixteen days—or eleven until the terrorist attack—they were there one moment and gone the next, becoming unwittingly the farewell party of the “short summer of concrete utopia” (Ruck). Olympic Games, however, exist in three temporal dimensions. In addition to their long gestation and the epiphany of the event itself, they generate concrete and emotional legacies, and in time become subject to memorialization of another age’s making. These effects are vital for an understanding of any Games, and in the case of Munich are best explained in relation to the three agencies that sponsored them: city, Land, and federal state.
“Much is left for the city when it’s over.” On 9 September in the Lenbachhaus, Kronawitter would have whisked his audience from the obvious infrastructural advantages the Games had brought toward the nobler but less tangible notions of “greater self-confidence and a little pride.” Yet, the material legacy of the Olympics should never be underplayed, and particularly not in Munich. Several years earlier, in 1969, it was precisely this aspect that Vogel chose to highlight in his laudatio when Brundage was bestowed the honor of signing the city’s Golden Book: “[Mr. President,] you mentioned that Pierre de Coubertin had two aims: namely that the Games should make healthier and stronger boys and girls and citizens. I think the Olympic idea has turned out to promote a third aim as well: to make better cities, to give cities subways and finer installations.”22
Munich’s long-term gains were many and various. Nearly three-quarters of the total DM 1.967 billion expenditure were invested in infrastructure (DM 1.35 billion to Munich, DM 94 million to Kiel) and, offset by the organizers’ income of DM 359 million from ticket sales, television revenue, and private donations, the ephemeral sixteen days cost only DM 165 million.23 Daume might have been exaggerating when he claimed the city’s contribution of DM 154 million had soared in value to two or three billion, but the gains were certainly considerable: fabulous new sports facilities and parkland, six thousand apartments, 1,800 student flats, three schools with 7,650 places, and a large exhibition hall.24 When it came to covering the future upkeep of the stadium, gymnastics hall, swimming pool, and cycle arena, the city brokered a further financial coup. According to the precedent of 1936, the federal government should have assumed responsibility for the various venues, but doubts about the durability of the roof made for protracted negotiations25 and the city eventually agreed in June 1972 to accept a single payment of DM 130 million from Bonn, based on estimates that two-thirds of the sum would be consumed by 2000.26 In reality, however, B+P’s masterpiece required only minor repair until 1988, and regular income from the site (including DM 15 million per year from the Bayern Munich soccer club) covered maintenance and allowed the city to invest its windfall, which grew to DM 220 million by the millennium.27
To support the sites, the city’s traffic infrastructure was dramatically improved between 1965 and 1972. Based on the German Federal Railway’s existing grid, a star-shaped suburban rail system (S-Bahn) was completed with twelve separate lines and 134 stops, stretching thirty-five kilometers from the historic center into the region.28 Tunneling through from Ostbahnhof and Hauptbahnhof to connect lines east and west of the river Isar and moving 4.2 kilometers of track underground paved the way for a pedestrian zone in the old part of the city between the hub at Marienplatz and Karlsplatz. The city’s first two subway lines (U-Bahn) were also added, the first complementing the S-Bahn with a twelve-kilometer north-south axis, the second providing a speedy link between Marienplatz and the Olympic venues four kilometers away. And the building of two ring roads (Altstadtring and the Mittlerer Ring) was accelerated to ease the burden on the radial road grid and cope with the sharp rise in car ownership, which more than doubled to 377,000 in the decade leading up to 1970.29 The Karlsplatz, in particular, believed to be the most congested square in Europe at the time, was greatly relieved.30
Much of this would have come about in due course, but the imminent arrival of the Games brought financial support and a sense of urgency.31 The schedule of urban planner Herbert Jensen was cut in half, and the city gained what Frankfurt and Stuttgart took decades and much greater sums to achieve. Individual car use was reduced by 40 percent, and the banning of traffic from the city center—deemed to be one of the main achievements of Vogel’s time in office—restored the city’s his toric luster.32 However, there were serious drawbacks too. The construction of the Altstadtring ring road caused much aesthetic damage—disfiguring the Prinz-Carl-Palais, a gem of German neoclassical architecture and seat of the Bavarian minister president, crowding the façade of the Haus der Kunst, and bisecting two nineteenth-century boulevards (the Maximilianstrasse and Prinzregentenstrasse). More importantly, the time constraints under which the “great leap forward” was taken meant that politicians and planners had little opportunity to learn from their mistakes. The monocentric orientation of the S-Bahn became largely irreversible, as it increased commuter traffic between the center and the surrounding region and reinforced precisely the functionalist division between work and living spaces that Vogel had feared after reading Jacobs’ critique of U.S. cities. Jensen’s attempt to halt the “shapeless accidental development” and “dissolution of the city” was also quickly undone as the commercial center continued to expand and swallow large sections of residential neighborhoods (e.g., Lehel and Maxvorstadt) for business use. By 1974, Jensen’s long-term vision, originally intended to last from the 1960s to 1990, was superseded by a new town development plan that replaced quantitative with qualitative growth, and encouraged polycentrism in the suburbs and region over the privileging of the center.33
Nonetheless, Munich became a more attractive city in which to live. Although its postwar population peaked in 1972, it was increasingly associated with the surrounding holiday region and regularly topped the popularity rankings.34 Despite immediate fears that the subdued ending to the Games had cost the country dearly—the director of the German Tourism Agency (Deutsche Zentrale für Tourismus) predicting that millions would be required to compensate for lost advertising after the curtailment of Bavarian dancing in the closing ceremony—tourist numbers increased.35 Notwithstanding a lack of detailed sources, it is clear the Games alerted domestic and overseas visitors to the city’s charms. By 1985, for example, 5.8 million overnight stays placed it far ahead of its national rivals; some 44 percent of all visitors came from abroad; and the average stay (2.6 days) suggested that it no longer served as a transit point, as before the Games, but established itself as a destination in its own right.36 For Munich citizens and tourists alike, the Olympic park proved a lasting attraction and could plausibly claim to have been Europe’s most popular leisure facility in the late twentieth century. Statistics vary, but taking a conservative estimate: by 1977, it had drawn in over twenty-one million paying customers, between nine thousand and thirteen thousand active sports participants per week, and untold numbers of casual visitors—a total estimated in 1982 to have reached one hundred and twenty million.37
As Daume proudly noted in 1979, “In Munich there are no ‘Olympic ruins,’ ” and despite the city’s two soccer teams (Bayern and 1860 Munich) moving to a purpose-built stadium in 2005, this is still the case today.38 But while statistics are easy to gather, the ideological legacy of the site is virtually impossible to ascertain. At the turn of the century, when Bayern Munich had almost succeeded in convincing Behnisch to convert the stadium into a dedicated, closed-in soccer arena, a wide range of views were articulated. The liberal press championed the democratic, symbolic moment of 1972 (so desired by the organizers and feared by Frei Otto), while the fans themselves showed little respect for the site as a “lieu de memoire.” Franz Beckenbauer, club president and chief organizer of the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany, spoke incautiously but doubtless for many when he described it as a “communist bowl” awaiting only “a few terrorists to come and blow it up.”39
While the state of Bavaria stood to profit less directly from the Olympics than its capital or the Federal Republic in general, it could be satisfied with its investment. The Land benefited from infrastructural development (not least the conversion of the hockey, volleyball, and media sites into a still much used Hochschulsportanlage for Munich’s two universities), commercial boosterism (Adidas, Siemens, etc.) and a tourist influx that extended well beyond the city’s boundaries. And if the PR campaign capitalized on Munich’s image, transferring it to the Land and the country at large, much of what the world perceived as typical of Munich applied equally to the Land. “Earthy,” folkloristic (Lederhosen and Dirndl), and “life-embracing” (yodeling, beer, Oktoberfest)—Munich stood mutatis mutandis for Bavaria.40 Most importantly, however, the Games marked an important stage in the Land’s postwar development from a backward, agricultural economy to one of the richest states in the country by the 1980s. Despite the general fatigue in the region after the major push toward the Games and growing skepticism about modernization across the Federal Republic in the wake of the OPEC crisis, the Olympics, as Ferdinand Kramer noted, “created a new balance in the development of the metropolis of Munich and the State of Bavaria with a noteworthy acknowledgement of Munich’s specific role in Bavaria as the state’s gateway to the world.”41
While the 1960s and 1970s model continues to resonate positively in reform discussions in the region and the city, there might even be evidence to support Kronawitter’s hoped for “pride” and “greater self-confidence.” Consolidating its stronghold as “the party that invented beautiful Bavaria,” the Christian Social Union (CSU) appropriated the Games’ strategy of presenting the Land as a bridge between modernity and tradition.42 In its 1974 regional election campaign, a television slot spliced aerial shots of the tent roof with cows grazing happily in Alpine pastures; showed Franz Josef Strauß, the future minister-president, in Bavarian dress alongside the atomic research reactor at Garching; and played a swing version of the popular “Bayerischer Defiliermarsch” to remind viewers of the opening ceremony two years earlier.43
Tellingly, although Munich was heavily subsidized by and hosted the Games for “the whole country”—as Kronawitter planned to mention—they were never subsequently exploited for federal publicity. An unspoken cross-party agreement prevented their use in the November elections of 1972, and the embarrassment of Fürstenfeldbruck and the related diplomatic fallout in the Middle East placed them largely off-limits. Paradoxically, the Munich and Bavarian authorities contributed least financially and caused the most damage with their security failures, but came away with the greater tangible benefits. As we have seen, Kronawitter’s hope “that the image of our city [would] retain a little luster,” was certainly fulfilled. The fate of Brandt’s wish to show the world a modern, democratic, and successful Germany, however, is altogether more difficult to determine. Despite the ecstatic reviews for the opening ceremony and the Olympic venues, the overall story is naturally entwined with the one event that Kronawitter’s draft inevitably omitted to mention: the terrorist attack.
Initially, Brandt experienced intense disappointment that the Games would “not go down in history as a happy occasion” (chapter 1), and he couldn’t have been cheered by the national press’s speculation about the loss of image abroad.44 Yet before the month was out, he seems to have changed his mind, telling the Spiegel at the height of the crisis with Egypt and Israel that the Federal Republic was “more highly regarded in the world than in 1969.”45 The impending federal election might have encouraged the chancellor’s bullish mood, but his vacillation mirrored the bifurcation of viewpoints around the world. Olympic insiders, of course, rallied around the hosts. Daume received letters from foreign dignitaries and sports functionaries thanking the OC for its hospitality and praising it for its organizational endeavors. Philip Noel-Baker, the British Nobel Peace laureate who had been closely involved in London 1948 sent his “warmest congratulations on all that [he] achieved in the greatest Olympic Games which [had] ever taken place,” claiming that British “television viewers all [said] . . . the Games were a magnificent experience.”46 But press coverage was more ambivalent. On the one hand, a New York Times editorial exculpated the authorities: “Since the attack on the Olympic Village was unprecedented, the West German government was unprepared and had to improvise as events unfolded. The terrorists had the advantage of surprise, and of the near-chaos that surprise produced.”47 But on the other, the massacre dominated the U.S. media for more than a week, with reports dissecting the Israeli refusal to negotiate, the West Germans’ bungled rescue attempt, and the controversial decision to continue the Games.
Crucially, as Melani McAlister observed, “many accounts pointed out the terrible irony that these deaths had happened at Munich, where the West Germans had been self-consciously trying to counter the memories of the Nazi Games of 1936.”48 This is hardly surprising. Brandt’s foreign minister Walter Scheel, after all, had told his ambassadors in 1970 the Games would show a different Germany from 1936 (see chapter 1); Aicher, Behnisch, and others had worked on the same principle; and the federal and Bavarian governments’ investigation into the attack made exactly that point in mitigation of its light security at the village.49 But while 1936 was intended as the inevitable foil against which the present and future Germany could be judged, the terrorist attack had inverted foreground and background. West Germany might well have been another country than the one that hosted the “Nazi Games,” but Black September and the failed liberation attempt had locked the two together and turned Munich into a backward- rather than forward-looking event. This much is clear from another speech that was never given—one prepared for Daume by an unidentified writer for the final meeting of OC members in 1977. On that occasion, Daume ignored the draft he had been sent, opening instead with, “The Munich Olympics are old hat,” (literally: “yesterday’s snow”) and closing the session, to applause and the sound of Almglocken, with a cheery “the Munich Olympics have left a warm after-glow—that is how it is, and that is how it will stay.”50 The text he decided to leave unread in the archive offered a grittier take on the Games, however, and came with a despondent note from its author: “None of the modern Olympics has made it into history. Only the first ones, because they were the beginning, and Berlin, because that’s when the Nazis started to deceive the world . . . and from Munich the whole world will remember the terrorist attack. . . . There is no hope of any lasting glory.”51
The unheard voice of 1977 had called it right. The terrorist attack hooks Munich uncomfortably to the 1936 Games, a phenomenon confirmed by the final pages of David Clay Large’s recent academic account of the “Nazi Games,” which repeat the trope of Munich’s intention.52 Popular Olympic history too is reductive—and the circumstances of adjacent Games proved less than conducive. The student massacre and black-power protests at Mexico City 1968, an African walkout and the financial disaster at Montreal 1976, and the tit-for-tat boycotts of Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984 combined to place Munich at the heart of a crisis narrative.53 Around the world, Munich is remembered for Mark Spitz, Olga Korbut, the terrorist attack, and the fact the West German “organizers were determined that everything about their Games should be different from those of 1936.”54 It is indicative of the shadow cast by 5 September that the organizers’ determination to show a new Germany rather than the world’s realization that one existed has become the historiographical default.
But for West Germany, as for other nations, cultural diplomacy had two dimensions. On the one hand, as Johannes Paulmann has stressed, “it served to establish and cultivate relations with foreign partners with the aim of rebuilding trust, furthering mutual understanding, and supporting national interests.” On the other, it “also affected self-images at home,” debates about how the country should present itself abroad contributing “markedly to the formation of identities in public institutions and societal groups.”55 If certain individuals—and in Paulmann’s analysis these tend to belong to various elites—“observed themselves in the mirror of their own representations abroad,” then the Olympics brought this process to more members and levels of society than any other event in the history of the Republic.56 Unlike state visits, trade fairs, and expos in foreign countries, the Games became an unavoidable part of almost every citizen’s daily existence. Bonn realized, in fact, that it needed their help to make the Games a success. In November 1970, an internal discussion paper in the Federal Press Office made the obvious point that the image visitors would “take home with them [would] essentially depend on the impressions [they] receive[d] in contact with Germans.” While many were “used to living with foreigners (occupation troops, allied armies, guest workers, visits abroad, foreign tourists in Germany),” the 1972 Olympics needed to be “understood as a task to which all Germans felt obliged.”57 The chancellor reiterated this point in a speech to mark the ceremonial handover of the venues to the OC in June 1972: “The way the hosts comport themselves and the openness of our citizens to our guests are even more important [than the venues]. Let’s disprove the notion . . . that ‘friendly Germans’ are the exception to the rule!”58
To this end, “taxi drivers, hotel employees, tourist guides, hostesses, and the man on the street” were all deemed “crucial,”59 kept well informed (not least by a general PR campaign “Olympics of Hospitality”), and—although not to the same extent as in Mexico four years earlier—targeted by specific schemes.60 Thousands of OC employees and hostesses were admonished to “show themselves particularly hospitable to foreigners,”61 over two hundred thousand of whom were distinguished by special badges distributed during an “Olympic Guest” project (Aktion Olympia-Gast).62 Taxi drivers were supplied with an Olympic car badge to make them feel “somewhat official.”63 A poster campaign (Die Welt zu Gast bei uns zuhause, “The World a Guest in Our Home”) and a mail-shot to 1.3 million homes around Munich offering various ticket incentives generated twenty thousand private beds to boost the meager ten thousand available in the city’s hotels.64 And the Glücksspirale lottery invited foreign celebrities—British Avengers star Patrick Macnee and émigré Croatian singer and actress Dunja Reiter—to appear on its television slots.
Despite such efforts, however, the mood preceding the Games was poor. Olympic sociologist Miquel de Moragas and others have posited that the host population’s stance toward a megaevent changes through distinct phases: expectation (six to four years before), mistrust and criticism in the local press (four to two years before), agreement (one year before), and finally euphoria, local solidarity, and limited criticism (year of the Games).65 In the Federal Republic, however, the picture was bleaker, with opinion polls showing a gradual slide until the eve of the event itself. In May 1966, a year after the IOC’s decision in Rome, an EMNID survey had found 80 percent of West Germans in favor of the Games, with nine against and eleven undecided.66 In the summer of 1971, when the mood should have reached a similar level again after a mid-cycle slump, the institute recorded only two-thirds supporting the Games, while some 29 percent expressed no opinion.67 In September of that year, only twenty thousand people came out to hear high-profile speakers and watch the film Munich—A City Invites in sixty-two cities across the country on the evening of Aktion Paukenschlag (Drumbeat), the OC’s major push to drum up grassroots support.68 Liselott Diem, sent to Mainz, took pleasure in criticizing the poor organization and dreary speech outline sent by Klein’s PR department.69 And in February and March 1972, despite increased efforts by the OC, which lamented that the “personal identification . . . and joy about ‘our Games’ [was] still missing,”70 the vital results had slipped again to 63 and 30 percent respectively.71 Most worryingly for the organizers, only 56 percent of those from a higher education background (i.e., those most likely to hold opinion-forming positions) supported the Games, with some 15 percent, twice the national average (7 percent), against.72 Just months before the starting pistol, Bonn was anticipating a poor return on its investment domestically.
Many factors contributed to the inauspicious standing. Advertising had initially concentrated on foreign audiences and was not launched in the Federal Republic until thirty months before the Games, when financial cuts had become the order of the day (see chapter 2). By 1972 the position had deteriorated further, a negligible subsidy of DM 100,000 to allow Paukenschlag volunteers to continue their work having to be rejected.73 The 1971 version of the lottery show was poorly presented and badly received after technical problems diminished the chance of winning a major prize.74 Even though two-thirds of the 3.5 million Olympic tickets were reserved for domestic use, only one in twenty-five Germans could buy one, and discontent spread further at the news that members of the Bavarian and federal parliaments could claim up to twenty each.75 The press—in retrospect, incorrectly—heavily criticized the cost of the whole enterprise, such that neither federal government nor the Land or communes around the country were prepared to finance Olympic flags to decorate their towns and border crossings.76 And in Munich itself, prominent cultural and architectural critics attacked the disfigurement of the historic center,77 while residents complained about pollution, inflation, and the cost to local taxpayers.78 The best the organizers could hope for was “grumbling consent.”79
In the event, however, their fragile hopes were far exceeded. Asked a few days after the Games whether—“all things told, i.e., the serene atmosphere until the terrorist attack and then the terrorist attack itself”—they could be considered a success, 80 percent of West Germans replied in the affirmative, taking the polls back to their highpoint of 1966. 78 percent supported the IOC’s decision to let the Games continue.80 Despite the much praised performance of the West German team (particularly over the last few days), these are strikingly counterintuitive figures—not least because of those who supported the Games in the previous poll, the highest proportion did so in the belief they would contribute to peace and understanding.81 And although anger was initially expressed at the police’s mistakes—most prominently by Brandt himself82—and the press expected the “shots fired at Fürstenfeldbruck” to “reverberate around national politics for some time to come,” the public spared the major politicians in the November elections.83 Brandt secured the SPD’s largest share of the vote, while his Free Democratic Party (FDP) colleagues Genscher and Scheel rose to record heights in the twelve months following the Games.84 In his official report, Manfred Schreiber, too, felt comfortable defending his policing policy, weighing up the “once-in-a-century event of a militarily executed attack” against the “sum total of all the pleasures and meetings between the nations,” and declared the security “a success.”85
Taken together, these reactions require some explanation. For while it is impossible to judge how well the Games would have been received without the attack, it is clear that it did not hinder greater acceptance domestically. Certainly a paradox was at work. On the one hand—as a West German diplomat stationed in the Middle East observed one year on—the population had still not recovered from the “ruination” of their Games, the Olympic ideal, and the event’s peaceful symbolism. Psychologically, “the way they brought matters to a conclusion [had been] rather inelegant and problematic” and continued to hamper the forgiving process and prevent Bonn from making necessary progress with the Palestinians.86 Yet on the other, this ruination seemed to make the Germans value their Games all the more and close ranks emotionally with the victims. The two aspects were linked. At a memorial ceremony in Washington, Senator Edward Kennedy noted that “the terrorist attack had been a tragedy not only for the Israeli but also the German people,” and his words caught the mood in the Federal Republic.87 Axel Springer, the pro-Israeli media tycoon, sent his condolences to Golda Meir in a telegram that was reprinted in all his newspapers on 7 September. More significantly, journalists and politicians saw the massacre as a moment to transcend the past. As an editorial in the popular Munich Abendzeitung put it: “Historians will note that here in Munich, only a few kilometers from Dachau, at the location of a horrible crime, Germans have cried next to Israelis. From the perspective of history, the image of the Germans who mourn the dead of Israel will be a marker—a marker at the beginning of a road which one day leads two nations away from bitterness.”88 President Heinemann received over four hundred letters congratulating him on his speech at the memorial ceremony, some from companies with hundreds of signatories,89 and a business in Reutlingen sponsored ten employees to work for up to four weeks in Israel on full salary.90
In the 1950s and 1960s, the West German public tended to sympathize with Israel in its hour of need—most prominently during the Six Day War and after an arson attack on an old people’s home in Munich (1970).91 But the reaction to the massacre eclipsed habitual empathies. The “common loathing of the crime” did not just “bring [the two nations] close together”—as Georg Kronawitter hoped at Munich City Council’s memorial ceremony on 7 September92—but led to a conflation of real and symbolic victims.93 The fact that a German police officer had died at Fürstenfeldbruck eased the public’s conscience and contributed to a heightened identification with Israel. On 8 September, Fliegerbauer was given a well-attended civic funeral, at which Kronawitter and Goppel represented the city and Land and wreaths were laid on behalf of Heinemann and Brandt. The policeman was celebrated as a hero who had paid the ultimate price in his attempt to liberate innocent hostages from the hands of “fanatics blind with rage.” At the end of the ceremony, a representative of the Israeli government expressed the condolences and gratitude of the Israeli people,94 and in the Münchner Jüdische Nachrichten, Ernest Landau stressed: “Wracked with pain and grief, we stand, with the whole Jewish people, before the coffins of these eleven young Israelis and the police officer Anton Fliegerbauer.”95
On a level distinct from Bonn’s diplomatic fire-fighting across the Middle East in the last third of 1972, public discourse and practice shunned the Arab world as much as it embraced its Jewish rivals. On the day of the attack, the OC, the Olympic Press Center DOZ, Deutsche Bundesbahn, and several private companies were sent anonymous bomb threats demanding the release of the hostages and the sacking of Arab workers.96 Soon afterward, Arab hostesses—despite some being daughters or wives of German citizens—and other employees in the Olympic village were removed to avoid confrontations.97 The OC considered a similar move at the Vier Jahreszeiten Hotel, where the IOC was staying but desisted for fear of repercussions.98 Twenty Tunisian participants at the Youth Camp departed for Austria “in fear of reprisals.”99 And many of the letters that Heinemann received demanded retaliatory measures against the Palestinians and their supporters. The reluctance of Egypt and its allies to condemn the attack did little to diffuse the situation, but the furor in the Federal Republic soon bled into another issue. Just as in the United States, where—as Melani McAlister noted—outrage at the senseless violence soon spilled over into well-worn debates about the futility or otherwise of the Vietnam War, the West German press and public linked the attack with its growing unease over foreign workers and immigration.100 In fact, press coverage of the security theme—both in Munich and Zagreb—remained surprisingly thin, international terrorism disappearing off the radar as quickly as the three surviving perpetrators made good their escape to Libya.101 What remained, however, was a fomenting anger toward foreigners in general—the Spiegel leading on 18 September, for instance, with stories such as “Imported Terror?” and “Arabs—not to be trusted.”102 Munich became a watershed for the 3.4 million guest workers in the Federal Republic. An election topic in October 1972, the country’s Ausländerpolitik was revised in the recruitment stop of 1973 and grew significantly restrictive.103
The terrorist attack undoubtedly influenced the West Germans’ view of their Olympics. In the immediate aftermath, surrogate victimhood in sympathy with Israel played into a much enhanced appreciation of the Games but mutated quickly into reprisals and policy change against foreign workers. Into the following year, it was this and a dislike of Palestinians that continued. For one small but significant group, however, the attack had precisely the opposite effect: the organizers. Daume, as his secretary later recalled, crumpled on hearing the news from Fürstenfeldbruck: “He looked not so much in pain as—dead. His face was lifeless and had the events of that terrible night written all over it.”104 Even at the end of the fortnight, he was uncertain about the IOC’s majority decision to let the Games go on.105 And at the memorial service in the Olympic Stadium, he appeared visibly shaken when proclaiming that “a celebration that . . . soclearly expressed the yearning of mankind for understanding, joy and peace, ha[d] been called into question.”106 Vogel, although convinced from the beginning the Games should continue, was equally devastated, noting that “the contrast to the bright colors of the days of peace [had] alerted the world to the horror of such atrocities and sharpened its conscience,” before accompanying the bodies back to Israel.107 For the others involved in the organization—as discussions and interviews with many of them at their thirty-year reunion in 2002 confirm—the Games came to an abrupt end after the massacre.108 Some left the Olympic village (and were refused money owed to them), while those who stayed completed their tasks out of a heavy sense of duty.109 We mention these reactions not merely as a footnote to the main narrative, or as a reminder of the need to differentiate, but because as the popular memory of Munich faded—the natural course, as Moragas maintains—those most closely involved in its organization carried it with them in interesting ways.
• • •
Although disappointing, it is hardly surprising that the IOC did nothing to remember the victims. With members from the Middle East but none from Israel, it was easiest to play its nonpolitical card and simply ignore the tragedy. Even before the Games finished, it had returned to business as usual—Brundage collecting signatories (including those of the marquis of Exeter, Jesse Owens, and Emil Zatopek) on a statement against commercialization and professionalization to take to an executive board meeting early in 1973.110 And at its session in Varna later that year, members stood in silence, but only to mark the passing of one of their own number, Comte Paolo Thaon di Revel.111 Yet in Munich—even at the height of popular support for Israel—the OC proved oddly reticent too. The day after the Games, Vogel rejected a suggestion from the German embassy in Washington (echoing one already received from the West German public) that the stadium be renamed after Moshe Weinberg, the Israeli wrestling coach killed in the initial struggle.112 He remarked, “It would be inappropriately excessive and perpetuate the memory of the tragedy in the Olympic village.”113 In fact, the OC struggled to find any appropriate memorial. In 1973, realizing it would be impossible to sell the Connollystraße apartment on the open market, the OC donated it to the Max Planck Society, which still uses it today as a guest house for international fellows, a subtle tablet by the entrance commemorating the hostages. Even this minor gesture was ill-fated, though. When first unveiled in November 1972, it caused understandable offense in Israel for listing incorrect names and displaying a cross for the Star of David, and was duly replaced by the Munich Jewish community and the Central Council of Jews in Germany.114 In the course of 1973, when Daume, Bieringer, and Hohenemser considered an idea from the publisher Güunther Neske to commission a more substantial memorial for the Olympic village from a young Jewish artist, they came to the same conclusion as Vogel: namely “that any monumentalization of the tragic event should be avoided on German soil.”115
FIGURE 23. Memorial plaque in front of 31 Connollystraße (photo: Carsten Schiller)
Although Vogel had encouraged nearly seven hundred Jewish émigrés to return to Munich for the Games, invited Israeli mayors to attend at the city’s expense, and in 1993, in keeping with his long-held views, would cofound the Verein “Gegen Vergessen—für Demokratie” (Association “Against Oblivion—For Democracy”)—both he and Daume maintained their public silence as the years went on.116 At the OC’s final meeting in 1977, no one mentioned the Israelis, Vogel introducing the only somber note to a mood of self-congratulation, when remembering three deceased colleagues: Ludwig Erhard (who had given his vital consent), Konrad Pöhner (the Bavarian finance minister), and Georg Brauchle (the deputy mayor who had worked tirelessly during the bid).117 Neither of the two main organizers attended the low-key commemorative ceremonies on the first and tenth anniversaries of the massacre, journalists recalled a whole range of different aspects to the Games ten years on,118 and by 1988 Daume was telling GEO magazine that the attack was “inconsequential in Germany” (literally, “only worth a footnote”).119 It was not until the 1990s that matters changed. Daume attended the twentieth anniversary service in 1992 organized by the German NOC, addressing some of the Israelis’ families on the theme of continued Jewish suffering.120 Three years later, the Wailing Beam (Klagebalken), a DM 500,000 memorial by sculptor Fritz König, containing the names of the eleven hostages and Anton Fliegerbauer, was erected at the entrance to the stadium concourse. And in 1999, a further memorial was unveiled at Fürstenfeldbruck, where in his speech Vogel treated Jewish affliction in the twentieth century, from the Holocaust to the Munich Olympics and the desecration of forty-seven Jewish gravestones in German cemeteries in 1998.121
Over the 1980s and 1990s, much, of course, had changed in the culture of public memory. But to the nation’s general transition from “Geschichtsvergessenheit” (historical amnesia) to “Geschichtsversessenheit” (an obsession with history) or even “ritualized confession of guilt” must be added the particular circumstances of the Munich event and its aftermath.122 For one, the fragile but important truce between West German diplomats, Israel, and the Arab states toward the end of 1972 and the withholding of evidence from the victims’ families until it was leaked in 1992 would have discouraged enthusiasm for commemorative events. For another, as Moragas and others note, if the Olympic Games return to prominence again, they do so invariably at some considerable distance. Given the general shape of German memorial culture, the opening of the court cases, and the scale of the tragedy itself, it is no surprise Munich’s place in the popular memory has been determined by the attack. Kevin MacDonald’s One Day in September (1999) and Steven Spielberg’s September 11-influenced Munich (2005) contributed to that trend.123 Windsurfer Gal Friedman’s dedication of Israel’s first Olympic gold medal (Athens 2004) to the murdered athletes and New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s incorporation of the massacre in his thoughts on global terrorism in 2001 confirm it.
This book has sought not to undermine that memorialization—which is, after all, a natural and much-studied historical process—but, whatever the Games might have bequeathed, to uncover the myriad processes of their making and significance at the time. Hosting or achieving success in megaevents can enhance many ordinary citizens’ sense of pride and identity. Such moments are complex nodes of experience: intense then fleeting, they might nonetheless serve as important pulses in an incremental but uneven curve of national feeling. Along with 1972, the surprise World Cup victory in 1954 (itself recently memorialized) had positive identificatory effects, while victory in the same tournament hosted on home soil in 1974 struggled to compete. But one important footnote remains. For if Munich 1972 is now remembered by the majority for the terrorist attack and enjoyed perhaps—in a physical but emotionally intangible way—by those who use its park and sports facilities, then it retains a special importance for one particular group. Leaving aside the senior organizers—Daume and his general secretary Herbert Kunze from the reconstruction generation and Vogel, Aicher, Behnisch, Grzimek, and Ruhnau of the skeptical “1945ers”—the Games were carried by thousands of young adults in their twenties and thirties. Hostesses, administrative staff, reporters at the time—many went on to occupy influential positions in public life.
FIGURE 24. View of the Olympic park and stadium from the Olympic mountain (photo: Carsten Schiller)
In his thought-provoking essay on the West German exhibit at the 1958 World Fair in Brussels, Johannes Paulmann observed that “the memories of contemporaries . . . point toward the essential role played by apparently minor things for the development of a collective memory in individuals,” noting it is “promising to do further research on [the] individual imprinting of self-consciousness in every day practice. Merely searching for the renewal and formation of a West German identity in the national debate of intellectuals and politicians,” he comments, “appears to miss many of the essential mechanisms of cultural appropriation.”124 While researching this book, we had the opportunity to hear the memories of many younger people involved in the Games, and as Paulmann suspected, their “imprinting” is worthy of note.
For Werner Rabe—a young regional reporter, and now head of sport at Bayerischer Rundfunk—the Games proved a formative experience: a first encounter with the international scene on home territory and a feeling—not of “wir sind wieder wer” (we are someone again) as often claimed for 1954—but “endlich sind wir dabei” (at last we’re there with everyone else).125 For Klaus von Lindeiner, the OC’s minute taker, general factotum for the official film, and later leading corporate lawyer—they brought the opportunity to interact at the highest administrative and cultural levels in national and international settings.126 And for the hundreds of hostesses—some of whom trained their successors at Olympic Games through Los Angeles 1984 and went on to senior positions in event management—they offered the chance to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime event.127 As their extensive questionnaire returns confirm, their primary motivation was West Germany’s becoming part of the Olympics and being involved themselves (“dabei sein”).128 They were extensively trained (and as the 1972 returns suggest, bored) by the latest computer-generated learning methods—but remember few of the details now. Instead, what remains is the deep fulfillment of putting on a world event with members of their own generation. These emotions and experiences are more difficult to measure than the facts, figures, and decisions contained in countless meters of archive files. But they are no less real, and present in the tear that comes to the eye of Gertrude Krombholz—chief hostess at Spitz’s swimming pool, later academic sports director at Munich’s Technische Universitat and leading functionary in the international Paralympics movement—as she digs out a letter sent by Daume in February 1972. Addressing the German hostesses, the OC president reminded them of their vital contribution to the Olympic Games and the Federal Republic with the words:
A hostess is something you are. Fundamentally, it is not something you can learn. This skill comes from the heart and very essence of a woman. You have to bring it with you. We hope that you will do this, that you will bring this gift to the task at hand, and in so doing will derive pleasure from it. . . . You will be working for very little money, but you will have the honor of actively contributing to what is in its own way a unique event in the world. Without doubt, it will enrich your lives and personalities.129
Munich 1972 proved, indeed, to be an encouragement and an experience that propelled many young people into their professional lives. The common denominator to their memories is “participation.” This was not a group that set off on a long march through the institutions or rode a wave of radical intent—but one that profited from the reform discussion of the “long 1960s” and took part in its single greatest practical experiment. In terms of human capital, this is Munich’s major legacy.
