The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany

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 eleven members of the Israeli team. In the first cultural and political history of the Munich Olympics, Kay Schiller and Christopher Young set these Games in 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 and deliver the first full account of one of the most significant moments in postwar German history.

"Schiller and Young have taken an almost unmanageable mass of information and turned it into a lively, engaging, insightful narrative that places the Games at the very center 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, and 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." ANDREI S. MARKOVITS, coauthor of Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture

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.