Content area
Full Text
Munich 1972: Tragedy, Terror, and Triumph at the Olympic Games . By David Clay Large . Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers , 2012. Pp. x + 372. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-0742567399 .
Book Reviews
The massacre at the Munich Olympics--the kidnapping and murder of Jewish athletes by Palestinian commandos on German soil--was the most brutal event in the modern history of sport. But there was more to the 1972 Olympics than the massacre. There were, for example, the sports. In contrast to the very fine, German-focused cultural history by Kay Schiller and Chris Young (The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany [2010]), David Large's book devotes considerable space to athletes--and to Americans. For Large, the athletic competition and the terror, though not inevitably paired, were organically linked. Both were extensions of a single, "intensely political" proposition: bringing together "the youth of the world" in staged festivity--which meant turning "this comfortable Bavarian town into a seething cockpit of world events" (5). Large thus tries to situate these Games within longer trend lines in international sports.
Writing for a crossover audience, Large traces the origins and pursuit of Munich's Olympic bid in the triple contexts of West German politics, East-West sporting relations, and the idiosyncratic gentleman's club known as the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Large keeps a critical distance from the larger-than-life figures at the core of his story: charismatic chief organizer Willi Daume; can-do Mayor Hans-Jochen Vogel (SPD); visionary designer Otl Aicher; fallen-saintly Chancellor Willy Brandt, whose leadership deficits during the hostage crisis Large rightly decries; and the high priest of Olympism,...