Munich became, mostly, an opportunity for family reconnection. A rainy walk in the English Garden, Munich’s large central park, with our cousin Sibylle and her young children; a big family dinner at the home of cousin Joachim and his wife Eva; another dinner with Sibylle and her partner Christian at their downtown apartment; a day trip to the countryside with Sibylle and the kids: moments I appreciated deeply, but which also left little time to explore the city and its history as much as I would have liked.
Reinhardt suggested a visit to the Olympic Park, site of the 1972 Olympic Games. The infamous Olympics, I should add, where eleven Israeli athletes were murdered in the birthplace of Nazism, only 30 years after the ghastly business being conducted in the death camps was gathering momentum.
The dull, overcast day was punctuated by the occasional shower as we strolled through the grounds, checking out the venues that were constructed for the Games. In the 70,000-seat stadium, where the eyes of the world followed the track and field events, the textures and geometric patterns created by tiers of empty green seats caught my photographer's eye.
We forewent a tour of the catwalks along the roof, but did climb the stairs to the upper level, which affords a view of the city. There was a zipline stretched across the width of the stadium, and the occasional shriek of delight or terror confirmed that another customer had purchased a ticket for the short thrill ride that this day was the only action in the now mostly empty sport hub.
The much busier aquatic centre, with children splashing in the pool and adults swimming laps, wasn’t so different from what we might see in a community centre back home in Canada, except for the towering glass walls and the creative “tent” design of the facility’s roof. It was in this pool that the American swimmer Mark Spitz won an incredible seven gold medals, each victory setting a new world record, at the 1972 Olympics—a remarkable achievement that was ultimately overshadowed by the shocking events that gripped the world’s attention the day after his final race. Since he was Jewish himself, Spitz left Munich soon after the kidnappings and killings occurred, out of concern that he might be a target as well.
Although more than forty years had passed, the Olympic grounds and structures were still impressive, and a point of pride for Münchner—the citizens of Munich. Sadly, the legacy of the Games will be forever tainted by the tragedy that unfolded here.
As we continued to meander around the grounds of the park, we came to an installation of posters commemorating some of the moments and individuals that stood out during the Games.
Two of the interpretive signs were dedicated to the hostage-taking and murder of the Jewish athletes. Is this it, I wondered? Is this the only memorial to the tragedy that went down in September 1972? I found out years later that a more fitting memorial was finally erected in 2017—45 years after the event. Why so long? Endemic antisemitism, perhaps, in concert with the hope that the blemish on the reputations of both the city and the International Olympic Committee would eventually fade away? Perhaps the city and the IOC understood that a memorial would be an ongoing reminder of the failures that allowed Black September, the Palestinian group that carried out the attack, to achieve its goal, reducing the upbeat motto of the Munich Olympics—“The Cheerful Games”—to a cruel joke. In any case, the memorial was finally opened two years too late for our visit to Munich.
A tsunami of cascading ironies, associations and serendipitous connections engulfed me on the drive home.
At the last Olympics hosted by Germany, the1936 Berlin Games, the African American gold medalist Jesse Owen put the lie to the supremacist ideology spouted by Hitler and the Nazis. German Jews were barred from competing in Berlin, even though some, like the Jewish German high-jumper Gretel Bergmann, were top performers in their sports. My paternal grandfather, an amateur athlete himself, attended those Games, making the 650-kilometre journey from his home near Heidelberg to the nation’s capital so he could take in what for him was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. He sent postcards and a souvenir sheet of postage stamps back home as a gift to my fifteen-year-old father-to-be—items that he, in turn, passed on to me in my youth, and which are still in my possession.
Soon after the conclusion of those Berlin Games, the Nazis stepped up the ethnic cleansing of Jews and Roma, along with other “undesirables,” leading ultimately to the horror of the Holocaust. When the war ended, the outrage engendered by the Nazis’ crimes helped to strengthen the Zionist cause, culminating in the creation of Israel in 1948.
This act of geopolitical manipulation was facilitated by the “Naqba”—the Palestinians' name for the ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 of their people from the swath of their homeland that had been carved out for the new Jewish State—resulting in decades of conflict, still unresolved as I write this over seventy-five years later. The abductions and murders at the Munich Olympics were just one episode in this long and painful saga, and the latest chapter—the brutal attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians in October 2023, and the subsequent, vastly disproportionate, response by Israel—is still ongoing.
Watching the sights of Munich stream past through the car window, I reflected on our inability, as a species, to overcome the ethnic chauvinism that drives so much of the never-ending conflict in the world, and the cycles of violence, retribution and revenge that seem impossible to break.
The resentment Germans felt over the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, ultimately led to the rise of the Nazis and the ensuing cataclysm, with tens of millions dead. Russians’ resentment over the devastation and atrocities inflicted by Germany during the Second World War, manifested in a horrific rampage of revenge rapes and murders as the Red Army swept into Germany in 1945. And, of course, the list goes on and on.
Ethnicity, territory, “us” against “them.” How much easier it would be, I mused, to create a peaceful world if we could just learn to put aside these obsessions and come together, as in the spirit of the Olympic movement, in a common purpose.
I put my ruminations aside as Reinhardt pulled the Mercedes into the garage. Later, after dinner at a nearby restaurant, we relaxed in the living room, sharing conversation over wine and Schnapps, and the warm Gemütlichkeit of the evening drove the ghosts of the not-so-cheerful Munich Olympics out of my thoughts.
Stay tuned for Part 3
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