The 1972 Munich Olympics—remembered almost exclusively for the devastating terrorist attack on the Israeli team—were intended to showcase the New Germany and replace lingering memories of the Third Reich. That hope was all but obliterated in the early hours of September 5, when gun-wielding Palestinians murdered 11 members of the Israeli team. In the first cultural and political history of the Munich Olympics, Kay Schiller and Christopher Young set these Games into both the context of 1972 and the history of the modern Olympiad. Delving into newly available documents, Schiller and Young chronicle the impact of the Munich Games on West German society.
Kay Schiller is Senior Lecturer in History at Durham University. His books on German-Jewish refugee scholars during National Socialism include Gelehrte Gegenwelten and Weltoffener Humanismus (edited with Gerald Hartung). Christopher Young is Reader in Modern and Medieval German Studies and Head of the Department of German and Dutch at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Narrativische Perspektiven in Wolframs Willehalm and a coauthor of History of the German Language through Texts.
"Schiller and Young have looked with more care and greater acuity than any of their predecessors at all the chief actors at every level within the German government and within the Olympic movement. If that were all that they had accomplished, they would deserve unstinting admiration, but they have taken the almost unmanageable mass of information and turned it into a lively, engaging, insightful narrative, which places the Games at the very centre of modern German history."—Allen Guttmann, author of The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games and recipient of the International Olympics Committee President's Award for historical scholarship
"The great strength of this stimulating, far-reaching book lies in its ability to excavate the uncanny proximity between the 1972 Munich Olympics and the 1936 Berlin games and between the 1972 tragedy and our own imperfect effort to somehow both ignore and fight terror."—Peter Fritzsche, author of Life and Death in the Third Reich
"This book is nothing short of a tour de force on every conceivable level: the breadth of its topics, the depth of its research, the elegance of its writing, the acuity of its argumentation. It is a must read for anybody interested in the Olympics and sports; just as it is for those wanting to learn exquisite details and appreciate wondrous insights about German politics and society; the relationship between East and West (in Germany, Europe and the world); German-Jewish-Israeli-Arab relations; city planning; the Sixties and their legacies to mention just some salient dimensions of this immensely rich book. I remain awed by this work."—Andrei S. Markovits, co-author of Gaming the World: How Sports are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture
368 pp.6 x 9Illus: 25 b/w photographs
9780520262133$75.00|£63.00Hardcover
Aug 2010