Olympic Games Berlin 2036: Like a child who covers his eyes and hopes that the monster will disappear

2023-08-22 17:56:31

Opinion Olympic Games Berlin 2036

Like a child who covers his eyes and hopes that the monster will go away

As of: 7:52 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes

Ghostly procession: athletes in front of the Pergamon Museum in 1936; WELT author Hannah Lühmann

Source: Getty Images; Claudius Plough

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The calls for Berlin to apply to host the 2036 Olympic Games are getting louder. But the idea that Nazi propaganda can be labeled “cosmopolitan” is dangerous.

Berlin, 2036, Olympic Stadium: where swastika flags once waved, the rainbows now peacefully flutter, where sporting competition was misused for the worst, various teams parade, cosmopolitan city visitors cavort in grandiosely prepared information centers. Immersive journeys into the gloomy past let the present merge with the past, release the visitor from the intoxicating event with a single resolute realization: It is overcome!

The more or less crazy idea that Berlin should apply to host the 2036 Olympic Games has been circulating for months. Two high-ranking politicians from Berlin have now given it further impetus: CDU parliamentary group leader Dirk Stettner and sports senator Iris Spranger consider the application a good idea and 2036 a “good year” to host the Olympic Games in Berlin. 100 years after the Nazi propaganda games, they want to show how “much” Berlin has “changed” and that it is now an “open metropolis” that “attracts people from all over the world”.

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Whatever one thinks of this idea – if it were implemented correctly, i.e. conceptually deeply thought through, it might not be so crazy after all -: There is also a good shot of number magic in it. The fact that we humans like to celebrate anniversaries has to do with the structure of memory itself: We humans are cyclical beings, we live through the eternal cycle of the seasons, we are physically involved in recurring processes.

The politics of remembrance is never just symbolic politics; if successful, it forces people to actively engage with themselves and the society that is the bearer of this remembrance. As is well known, these thoughts about the structure of remembrance play a major role in connection with National Socialism and the Shoah, since they challenge remembrance in a previously unknown way: How do you represent something (in art, in ritual, in ceremony) that fills a gap in the representation itself?

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What does that mean in the case of the seemingly naïve notion that the 1936 Olympic Games could be overwritten with cosmopolitanism, so to speak? The concept of cosmopolitanism is already up for grabs today, in 2023, like it hasn’t been for a long time. Anyone planning for 16 years from now is planning like someone did in 1923 for 1936. Anyone who talks about “openness to the world” and simply claims that it will exist in the future is like a child who covers his eyes and hopes that the monster will disappear.

But anyone who believes in the quasi-magical power of the date 2036 should think more than a little about what will happen when it comes back. It is a well-known fact that what is suppressed returns.