1972, the year that remains: How the Olympic Games shaped Munich – culture

For a child growing up in the 1970s, Munich was a city with two faces. Abstract categories such as “tradition” and “modernity” were of course not yet relevant, but on walks with grandfather from Marienplatz to Schwabing, to a certain snack bar on Leopoldstrasse, or on Saturday shopping trips to the Euro-Industriepark in the very north, it became clear always got the feeling that the hometown changed its atmosphere at certain points, that it suddenly changed from colorful to silvery-cool, from intricate to straight, from small-scale to open.

Around the center with its labyrinthine network of streets, Munich was homely, in some places almost rural; the nickname “village of millions” that I hear on the local news on the radio or in the Evening News picked up at breakfast was valid here. But every look out of the car window on the Mittlerer Ring – at the BMW building and the narrow TV tower in the north-west, at the Arabella high-rise in the north-east – every ride on the newly opened subway, whose stops were all the more brittle the further you go far away from the city center (the “Bonner Platz”, the “Scheidplatz” only colorless passages), released the image of a different Munich, which seemed strange to the child’s perception, but which also aroused a kind of fascination with its elegant austerity .

The beer garden and residential city merged into an ensemble of clear, sublime forms, in the vertical and horizontal, above and below ground, and it took me until I finished school, maybe even into my studies, before I realized that this transformation had to do with a single event. On April 26, 1966, Munich was awarded the contract for the 1972 Olympic Games, and in the six years in between the modern face of the city was created: the Olympic grounds and the S-Bahn were built especially for the event; Middle ring, subway and landmark buildings (such as BMW’s four-cylinder and Arabellahaus) completed on time in accelerated work. A small Brasilia in the foothills of the Alps.

In the years before 1972, the city was full of construction sites, cranes and pits. The films of the young Munich cinema bear witness to this

At the end of the 1960s, Munich was a single major construction site – the main axis of the city, from Lindwurmstrasse via Stachus and Marienplatz to Ludwigsstrasse and Leopoldstrasse, torn up to the edge of the sidewalks (pedestrians had to snake their way along the houses); on the Oberwiesenfeld in the north, the future Olympic site, an army of cranes and workers. In the films of the young Munich cinema this transformation is preserved today as a side effect; sometimes the cameras of Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Rudolf Thomé or Eckhart Schmidt aim at the construction sites and pits for so long that the suspicion arises that the directors already knew at the time what documentary appeal these temporary locations would one day have.

In “Rote Sonne” from 1969, a man is shot from the makeshift bridge over Sonnenstraße, which passers-by had to cross during the construction of the S-Bahn at Stachus. In “Jet Generation” from 1968 one sees the extensive, still empty Oberwiesenfeld on which stands nothing but the imposing television tower and the images are reminiscent of the forgotten fact that this tower in front erected when the games were awarded and only subsequently added to the ensemble of the Olympic Park (the name “Olympic Tower” is actually a historical forgery).

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But it is precisely this hilly area between Neuhausen and Nordschwabing that reminds us that the period between 1966 and 1972 was not the first major transformation in Munich in the 20th century. The city was hollowed out only a good twenty years before the start of the reconstruction measures, but not voluntarily at the time, but violently, not in the name of productivity but of destruction. From the early summer of 1945, the war debris from bombed Munich was piled up on four heaps of rubble outside the city center, the largest of which was Oberwiesenfeld, a former airfield and parade ground.

The historic center of Munich was largely destroyed after the Second World War, and the faithful reconstruction, which gave a child in the 1970s the safe impression that the area between the Paulskirche, Frauenkirche and Theatinerkirche was ancient, lagged behind over the months of liberation hanging by a thread. Only a slightly different voting ratio, and the American military government would have had the old town built according to completely new design plans, or even relocated Munich to Lake Starnberg. However, in August 1945 the decision was made to go for a tradition-led reconstruction, the joints of which had long since faded and leveled for the following generation; the step towards a visible renewal of the cityscape only took place in the run-up to the Olympic Games.

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The most spectacular part of this renewal was the Olympic Park, with the stadium, the hall, the swimming pool and the flowing roof that spans everything; behind it began the terraced Olympic Village, which, contrary to its name, gave the city greater urbanity. The old Oberwiesenfeld therefore has a multi-layered function in the history of Munich: in an archaeological sense, the sediments of the city’s history in the 20th century stand out in this hilly landscape, the catastrophe of the Second World War, the shirt-sleeved commando “Rama dama” in the years that followed, finally, the modernity of the Olympic Games, whose often-vaunted cheerfulness was shattered again by the assassination of Israeli athletes on September 5th.

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Almost everything avant-garde and glamor that has emerged from Munich, considered a provincial city in the rest of Germany, in the last fifty years has a direct or indirect connection with 1972. The disco movement, for example, had its global center for some time in the Musicland Studios Giorgio Moroders, which were housed in the Arabellahaus in Bogenhausen; up until the early 1980s, rock bands like Led Zeppelin, queen and the Rolling Stones recorded their records here and lived in the hotel wing of the house that had been specially opened for the Olympic Games. This connection, in turn, gave rise to Freddie Mercury’s notorious love for Munich, which in the course of the 1980s shifted more and more to the bars in the Glockenbachviertel.

How might this city appear to its seven- or eleven-year-old residents today? Have the elements and components built between 1966 and 1972, which were created twice as long ago as the bombings of the Second World War, integrated seamlessly into the cityscape, overlaid with a patina that is no longer inferior to that of the town hall or the residence buildings? In many respects, the brand-new Olympic infrastructure itself has long since become historic and outdated, not only in terms of the notoriously fragile technology of the main S-Bahn line, but also in terms of design: the dark blue pictogram at the entrances to the U-Bahn stations For example, until recently, it still showed a man with a hat descending the stairs.

However, just how deep the cut was in the five or six years before the Olympic Games can be seen if you compare an old TV report about Munich from 1965 with one from the early 1970s on YouTube. The first pictures show a leisurely, folkloric city whose idyll is clouded by the many gaps in the war and one-story makeshift buildings; the second a modern metropolis. The fact that the film and television recordings switched from black and white to color in precisely these years is consistent and deepens this caesura, as if the media-technological renewal were aware of that of the cityscape. The post-war period finally ended in Munich in 1972.