LETTER FROM BERLIN
Paris in 2024, Los Angeles in 2028, Brisbane in 2032. And in 2036, where will the Olympic Games (OG) take place? One city, in any case, would welcome them: Berlin. Its mayor, Kai Wegner, confirmed this on Tuesday, November 14, by signing a “memorandum of understanding” which formalized his candidacy. Or rather its candidacy since it is only next year that we will know if Germany is entering the race to win the Olympic Games in 2036.
The last time – and the only time – the Games were held in Berlin dates back to 1936, three years after Adolf Hitler came to power, who made them a showcase for his propaganda. 2036 after 1936? For the mayor, the centenary is “tremendous luck” demonstrate “the new Berlin”a “colorful, diverse and open metropolis”in other words the complete opposite of what it was a century ago. “I imagine the Israeli team entering the same Olympic stadium, the same place where, a hundred years earlier, games were hijacked for political purposes. It would be a second victory over Nazi Germany.”enthused Kai Wegner on November 14.
Not everyone is of this opinion. In 2019, when the idea of a Berlin candidacy for 2036 began to circulate, the Minister of the Interior and Sports at the time, Horst Seehofer, clearly spoke out against: “I can’t imagine it. This would open a terrifying debate on an international scale, and it would be the Olympic idea that would be tarnished. How would this be viewed by the rest of the world? Are the Germans celebrating the centenary of the Nazi Games? This is not possible”declared the leader of the Bavarian conservatives in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
His social democratic successor, Nancy Faeser, thinks exactly the opposite. Interviewed in May by the online media The Pioneerthe current Federal Minister of the Interior and Sport said that in the event of Germany’s candidacy for the 2036 Olympic Games, the question of “confrontation with history” would necessarily arise. And that, in this case, “it is entirely imaginable that this confrontation would take place where the events took place, where the persecutions and attacks on human dignity took place”.
Memorial issue and financial issue
If a few columns were published in different newspapers to express unease at the idea of seeing Berlin welcoming the “centenary games” in the decor which keeps the memory of the images of Leni Riefenstahl and her Gods of the Stadiumthe historical argument is not central to many of those who are against a candidacy.
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