September 5 (2024)

September 5 tells the story of political violence at the 1972 Munich summer Olympic games from the perspective of the ABC Sports production team that covered it. During the games that year, the militant Palestinian group Black September kidnapped eleven Israeli athletes at the Olympic village, killing two of them there and the other nine at the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield near Munich when German police attacked the abductors before they could leave the country with their hostages on a plane to Cairo. Five terrorists and one Munich police officer were also killed in the attack. In his widely cited book One Day in September, British journalist Simon Reeve lays out the larger historical and political context for this violence at the Munich games, explaining how the Black September group was motivated by their belief that “the Jews had stolen our land and expelled us from it,” and saw the violence at the Munich Olympics as “a showcase where they could bring their grievance to the millions watching on television around the world.”1 Reeve also explains how the German organizers of the Munich Olympics hoped to use them to shed their historical association with anti-Semitism and violence against the Jews dating back to the Nazi Holocaust, but that these killings were part of a pattern of terrorist attacks by Black September aimed at Israel that began in 1970.2Security at the Munich games as well as their response to the abductions of the Israeli athletes were badly mismanaged by German authorities. Even after the hostages had been taken, the German police failed to collect accurate intelligence on the terrorists or develop an effective response. They mistakenly thought there were five members of the Black September group holding the Israeli athletes, when in fact there were eight. As a result, after the captors and hostages moved to the airfield to leave the country and the police launched their attack, they only had five snipers in place. Even worse, those sharp shooters couldn't communicate among themselves because inadequate equipment had been issued. Such mismanagement undermined the execution of the attack the Germans launched against the terrorists at the airport and contributed to the death of the hostages.September 5 does not explain all these problems with the German authorities’ ineffective response, just as it doesn't attempt to establish the larger political context for the abductions. However, the film does refer briefly to the German incompetence as ABC's coverage reveals it, showing how the Black September commandos could see moves by the German police on television and the failure to control traffic around the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield so that more personnel could be brought in to assist in the attack on the terrorists. Rather than explain or depict contextual issues that caused the Black September attack and determined its tragic outcome, September 5 concentrates on the smaller drama of the ABC TV coverage and the challenges its producers, technicians, reporters, and commentators faced as they tried to make sense of the events in real time to a worldwide audience of nine hundred million people. We see the speed of and pressure on the ABC team trying to figure out what is happening and present the story through visual images and informed reporting by Peter Jennings and Jim McKay to their viewing audience. The character of Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), the director of the ABC control room, is central as the film shows him in numerous scenes orchestrating this complex and challenging coverage. We also see Peter Sarsgaard playing Roone Arledge, the president of ABC Sports, whose successful strategy to build ratings for TV coverage of athletic competition by promoting viewer emotional identification with the participants is exemplified when he instructs Mason to find out information about who the hostages are and present that to the audience. September 5 also emphasizes the work of Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), a German reporter and translator for the network during the games. Following Arledge's order, Gebhardt identifies the hostages and gets photos of them to show on the air, and she translates important information coming from the German authorities that guides Arledge and Mason's decisions about where to direct the network's coverage.Yet as much as September 5 celebrates ABC's coverage during the 1972 Olympics, it also makes clear how it joined other media outlets in making one crucial mistake. After the Israeli athletes and their captors were flown in helicopters to Fürstenfeldbruck by the German authorities, who had made a deal to let the Black September militants take them to Egypt, a false rumor circulated that they had all been freed. Just as offers from the Israeli government to help with a response to the kidnapping were rejected by the German authorities, those in charge at ABC dismiss the warning by Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), their Jewish American head of operations at the games, not to report the news of the hostages’ release until it could be verified. The caution Bader shows in this scene implies an understanding of the larger historical conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians that Reeve explains in his book: Both sides held strong positions that they refused to compromise, and therefore, they were both willing to risk violence.3However, the film portrays Mason, the director of the ABC control room, as seemingly unaware of this longstanding hostility and violence and hopeful that the story he is presenting will have a happy ending for the hostages. Mason therefore agrees to report the positive news of the athletes’ supposed rescue on the air before it is learned that, in fact, once the shooting started at the airfield between the German police and the Black September members, all the Israelis were killed. A similar subversion of optimism by political and historical reality happens in September 5 when Gebhardt reveals German hopes to avoid repeating the killing of innocent Jews that had so marred the country's past, only later to acknowledge, after returning from the airfield where the Israeli hostages had been killed, that “innocent people died in Germany again and we failed.”September 5 ends by paralleling this failure of the German authorities to respond effectively to the hostage crisis with ABC's inability to get the story completely right because of Mason's decision to air the false report of the Israeli athletes’ release. Reeve devotes a large part of his book to explaining how the German authorities for decades denied access to information documenting their failures during the Black September abduction, even to the families of the murdered Israeli athletes. Similarly, September 5 concludes with Roone Arledge's self-denial when he tells Mason to put aside the catastrophe of his decision to report the false news of the hostages’ release and instead get ready for coverage of their memorial service the next day. Arledge in this scene implies that in the news business what matters more than giving the audience the right, accurate story is that nine hundred million people were watching. Therefore, when the film presents in white text on a black screen in its final seconds that ABC's coverage marked “the first act of terrorism broadcast live around the world” we understand that what made the coverage a success was that it was so widely seen, not that it explained to the audience the causes of the terrorists’ desperate violence or even exactly what happened in the climactic moments at the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield

Context (archaeology · Football · German · Grievance · Militant · Nazism · Officer · Politics · Terrorism · American Sports and Literature · German History and Society · Sports, Gender, and Society