"Finally untangling the knot"

From September 5 to 7, 2023, the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) hosted its first major working conference dedicated to the study of the attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics. The event was attended by the study’s international commission of historians and by the research center staff. The project also involves the history of the culture of remembrance that followed the attack. As part of the conference, the entire team, along with Juliane Seifert, State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community, visited the Olympic Park with its various memorial sites as part of the “Place of Memory” inaugurated in 2017. Curator Piritta Kleiner was on hand to provide insights into its development. 

The team also passed by the  Klagebalken (“Mourning Beam”), a monument erected in 1995 to commemorate the victims of the attack, and walked through the former Olympic Village to Connollystraße 31, where the terrorists took eleven Israeli athletes hostage 51 years earlier. A plaque, placed there in 1972, invokes the memory of the victims. 

Memory was also the focus of an evening event at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. A panel discussion, moderated by Eva Oberloskamp, head of the research project, was held on the subject of “Munich 1972: A Divided Remembrance? The Olympic Attack in the Culture of Remembrance of Germany and Israel”. Opening remarks were presented by Markus Schwaiger, President of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, State Secretary Juliane Seifert, Israeli Consul General Talya Lador-Fresher, Ludwig Spaenle, the Bavarian Commissioner for Jewish Life and against Antisemitism, for Remembrance Work and Historical Heritage, and Ankie Spitzer, widow of the murdered fencing coach Andrei Spitzer. 

Ankie Spitzer sent her message as a video and followed the event through a livestream with simultaneous Hebrew translation. Spitzer explained that she had waited 51 years for the moment and thanked the team of historians “from the bottom of her heart”. She expressed her hopes and high expectations.

Changes in the German culture of remembrance 

 Eva Oberloskamp began the panel discussion by emphasizing how the attack on the Israeli Olympic team continued to be of great relevance today, especially in the German political arena and with regard to German-Israeli relations. Roman Deininger, chief reporter for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and co-author with Uwe Ritzer of the book Die Spiele des Jahrhunderts. Olympia 1972, der Terror und das neue Deutschland (“The Games of the Century: The 1972 Olympics, Terror, and the New Germany”), described the German culture of remembrance: “The German perspective has always maintained: Our joyful games were overshadowed, but we wish to acknowledge that shadow as little as possible.” It was only a new generation of politicians, unburdened by the past, that would finally be able to untangle that knot – and even then, only under significant pressure from the victims’ families. Kay Schiller, a professor at Durham University and specialist in sports and cultural history, added that it was not until after 1990, when Germany shifted the focus of its memory politics from addressing Nazi crimes to confronting the crimes of the GDR, that renewed engagement with the attack on the Israeli Olympic team would begin. 

Petra Terhoeven of the University of Göttingen, a member of the commission of historians, who researches how victims of political violence are treated, recently joined Lutz Kreller of the IfZ to visit Israel and to meet with survivors and their families. She recalled how she frequently heard one sentence in particular: “It feels like it happened only yesterday.” 

Shlomo Shpiro of Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, also a member of the commission, emphasized how deeply the attack is embedded in the consciousness of Israeli society. Unlike many other terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, the events of Munich in 1972 have not been forgotten, remaining very much alive, even among younger generations in Israel. 

The video of the event can be accessed from the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.