The 1972 Munich Olympics moves far beyond the history of sports. Kay Schiller (senior lecturer in history, Durham University) and Christopher Young (chair, department of German and Dutch, University of Cambridge) convincingly show that the Munich Olympics crystallized a set of key contemporary assumptions about West German politics, culture, and society that hinged on postwar notions of the modern. Their analysis avoids reified conceptions that link modernity to technocratic progress, western democracy, and market capitalism, even as they show how important such ideas were to West Germans in the early 1970s. This ambitious and exciting book, a testament to the benefits of authorial cooperation that is far too rare among historians, offers a far-reaching yet richly textured portrait of the Federal Republic at a pivotal moment. It deserves the widest possible audience.

As the authors assert, scholarly and popular perceptions of Munich 1972 labor under the shadow of the 1936 Nazi Olympics in Berlin and the terrorist attack perpetrated by Black September, a radical Palestinian group, that took the lives of eleven Israeli athletes, five terrorists, and one German policeman. These events receive their due, but the authors work beyond them to “tell the story of Munich from the beginning rather than the end” (p. 2). The book travels deftly from an internal history of West Germany's Olympic bid through the Munich project's connections to memories of 1936, West German design, the 1960s youth movements, and Cold-War diplomacy.

Promoting West German modernity was certainly the goal of those who sought to bring the Olympics to Munich. As Vice-Chancellor and Foreign Minister Walter Scheel put it, playing host was a “unique opportunity to use the worldwide interest in sport” to promote “our development and state and to project to the rest of the world the image of a modern Germany in all its political, economic, social, and cultural facets” (p. 3). The main organizers—Willi Daume, colloquially known as “the Head of German Sports” because of his close connections to all things athletic, and Hans-Jochen Vogel, the ambitious social democratic mayor of Munich from 1960 to 1972—were likewise inspired by a vision of “wishful technocratic optimism” (p. 27). The vision should ring bells: it inspired urban renewal projects across the United States, western Europe, and the east bloc in those years, and the West German organizers were eager to exploit its potential benefits on the city, state, and national levels. Their efforts to convince the International Olympic Committee and indeed world public opinion that West Germany was an appropriate host required a broadly shared faith in large-scale rational planning and a loudly proclaimed commitment to peace, social tolerance, and democracy.

Bringing the Olympics to Munich inevitably raised comparisons with Berlin 1936, and attempts to manage the legacy of the Nazi past loom large in the authors' analysis. This was not all negative. “In terms of organization, spectacle, and symbolic capital, subsequent Games have done little more than tinker with Berlin's blueprint,” the authors provocatively assert. “In this important sense, 1936 was the making of the modern Olympics” (p. 60). With this baggage, contemporary reactions were bound to be complex. They ranged from critical denunciation in the left-wing press to open appreciation of what the authors call “the German Olympic imagination”—a sort of creepy philhellinism, whose adherents championed the innocence of sports and cherished the 1936 Berlin Olympics for their supposed revitalization of Olympic ideals despite Nazi sponsorship (p. 57). For the intellectual elites who organized the event, 1936 was inevitably “both foil and inspiration” (p. 124).

The inspiration was typically behind the scenes—younger organizers quite clearly recognized the need to downplay the “German Olympic imagination” and the taint of Berlin. Two avenues were particularly convenient for this agenda: the high-modern design of everything associated with the Olympics and the appropriation of certain defanged aspects of the 1960s youth culture. From the undulating Olympic Park and stadium with its stunning Plexiglas roof, to designer Otl Aicher's minimalist pictograms and vivid graphics, to the innovative opening ceremony, “Munich 1972 became a Gesamtkunstwerk” intended to “transcend memories of 1936” and demonstrate West Germany's commitment to postwar modernity (p. 94). Sympathy for the “Spirit of 68” further symbolized the new openness of West German society. As counterculture radicals mounted a critique of capitalist sports, organizers made room for the free lifestyles and hedonism of the youth movement at the Olympic Youth Camp and the “Avenue of Games,” or “Spielstraße.” Official tolerance for spontaneous pop exuberance only went so far, but as surviving clips on YouTube show, the Spielstraße made space for any number of colorful if not exactly radical happenings.

The authors locate all this in the context of ongoing Cold-War confrontations. Ostpolitik had significantly eased Cold-War conflicts, and for the first time East Germany received full Olympic recognition and fielded its own national team. Underlying tensions between East and West Germany and among socialist sister states gave a dramatic edge to the Games; politics nonetheless paled before West German success in mounting “the most modern Games in Olympic history” (p. 174).

Schiller and Young cover the terrorist attack in the final chapter, where they offer a sober account that places the events in broader contexts. Like Al-Qaeda on 9/11, the Black September group engaged in a new and surprising form of assault that simply overwhelmed both West German and Israeli security measures. The events, watched by millions around the world on the hyperreal television coverage that undermined attempts to free the hostages, “plunged the authorities into a dysfunctional stupor” (p. 197). In the long run, despite the intense diplomatic quarrels that followed the attacks, West Germany quickly returned to friendly relations with Israel and the Arab states alike.

The 1972 Munich Olympics is as much about the culmination or even swan song of West German modernity as it is about its making. In a wide-ranging conclusion on the legacies of the Games, the authors note that the “technocratic optimism,” “the futuristic rationality of the early computer age” (p. 221), and the “reform discourse of democracy, freedom, and participation” (p. 223) that inspired the Olympics had been mostly undone by the mid-1970s. Ongoing waves of terrorism, the energy crisis, economic downturn, and environmental degradation cast serious doubts on modernist certainties. A final section on the “thousands of young adults in their twenties and thirties” who worked on the Olympics and “went on to occupy influential positions in public life” strikes an oddly sentimental note, but offers a satisfying happy end to what might have been a rather gloomy close (p. 238).