Murder and Memory at the Munich Olympics
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3344802 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Noel D Cary (College of the Holy Cross, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 94 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 42-85 |
| Publication date | 2022-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Modern History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-2801 • E-ISSN: 1537-5358 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/718268 |
| OpenAlex | W4220863666 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 19 |
Intended to contrast with the Nazi-hosted Olympics of 1936, the Munich Olympics of 1972 provide a useful cultural site for analyzing West German narratives about the Nazi past and the democratic present in the “Long 1960s.” This article examines the press response to Munich’s successful bid; certain elements of the planning; an Olympic-eve ceremony of public mourning at the concentration camp in Dachau (a Munich suburb); and the responses of officials, electronic media, and Jewish Germans to the murder by Palestinian operatives of Jewish Israeli athletes. This evidence complicates binary conceptualizations of West German memory culture, such as self-imputed victimhood versus contrition, youthful indignation versus mainstream complacency, evasiveness versus earnestness, and the alleged movement of the Nazi past from oblivion to obsession. According to some historians, Chancellor Willy Brandt’s election in 1969 marked a fresh public readiness to embrace a culture of contrition. Others see the 1960s/70s as a time of bifurcation between the indifferent and the indignant. Differing from both schools of thought, this article suggests the dominance in this period of a distinct master narrative, “redemptive rehabilitation through transformative reconstruction.” Exemplified by the Olympics but wider in relevance, “transformative reconstruction” involved both acknowledging and erasing the Nazi past and framed the two as complementary. Although these efforts to displace the past sometimes operated as an evasion, they also generated unexpectedly earnest bouts of memory work. The Olympics thereby enable us to see what is elsewhere more obscure: that there was an intense internal codependency between oblivion and obsession
Aesthetics · Art · Democracy · Indignation · Literature · Mainstream · Media studies · Memory work · Narrative · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Transformative learning · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy
Beyond Justice
War Stories
Facing the Nazi Past
Munich and Memory
Undeclared Wars with Israel
German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past
The Miracle Years. A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968
Globalizing Sport
Olympics in divided Berlin? Popular culture and political imagination at the Cold War frontier
The Borders of the Rechtsstaat in the Arab Autumn
Coping with the Nazi Past
Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953
Antisemitism, Everyday Life, and the Devastation of Public Morals in Nazi Germany
What Has “Coming to Terms with the Past” Meant in Post-World War II Germany? From History to Memory to the “History of Memory”
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |