23 Giugno 2007
The dark Olympic light
Ho trovato una bella rivista, oggi pomeriggio, mentre vagavo all’interno di un negozietto alla ricerca di un po’ di insalata. Per la precisione, si tratta di “BBC History Magazine“. Un po’ caruccia (3.60 a copia), ma dai contenuti davvero di qualità. L’articolo di copertina (”Hitler, was he mad to take on America?“) è un’analisi di Ian Kershaw, lucida, chiara e precisa come poche mi era capitato di vedere in vita mia. Riesce a trovare un filo conduttore che lega, meravigliosamente bene, tutte le decisioni più “controverse” della Germania nel contesto della seconda guerra mondiale. Ma non è di questo che voglio parlare in questo post. Preferisco riportare un altro articolo, più leggero, ma molto più ricco di di significato: “The dark Olympic light“, di Chris Bowlby.
As China prepares to host 2008’s sporting supershow, CHRIS BOWLBY recalls how one Olympic tradition was born in a Nazi propaganda coup
The lone athlete runs into a hushed and eager stadium, proudly bearing aloft the torch that will reignite the games once more: it’s the critical moment in the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games.
The flame is being carried over several countries and even across Everest to reach Beijing in time for next year’s Games there. Amid the imagery of global sporting unity, few may care to recall that this Olympic tradition is in fact a Nazi invention, one of Adolf Hitler’s most grotesque propaganda triumphs in the light of what followed the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.
The organiser of those Games, Carl Diem, wanted an event linking the modern Olympics to the ancient, so devised a torch relay from the original Olympic site in Greece to Berlin. The idea was adopted with enthusiasm by the Nazi leadership, which portrayed classical Greece as an Aryan forerunner of its modern German Reich. And the event blended perfectly Nazi perversion of history with publicity for contemporary German skills. The first torch was lit by the sun in the Temple of Zeus in Greece with the help of mirrors made by the German company Zeiss. Steel-clad magnesium torches to carry the flame were produced by the Ruhr-based industrial giant Krupp. The relay was filmed and given international radio coverage.
When the flame arrived in Berlin, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels staged a ceremony in the city before the Games began. The blue-eyed Siegfried Eifrig ran with the torch through thousands of Hitler Youth members flanked by huge swastika flags. He then lit a fire on an altar – typical of the pseudo-religious symbolism that Nazism relished.
I visited Eifrig, now in his late nineties, in the Berlin flat where he still proudly display his torch. He described how nationalist feeling in Germany was especially strong during the Olympics, reinforcing a sense of renewal after the early 1930s Slump. Life for him later was very different: in his photo album pictures of his starring role in 1936 are followed by images of his time as a soldier during the invasion of France in 1940. Eventually he became a british POW. It is knowledge of what followed that makes the 1936 relay so poignant now.
“Sporting chivalrous contest”, Hitler declared just before the torch was lit, “helps knit the bonds of peace between nations. Therefore may the Olympic flame never expire”. Yet the flame’s arrival in Vienna prompted major pro-Nazi demonstrations, helping pave the way for the Anschluss in 1938. In Hungary gipsy musicians who serenaded the flame were later deported to Nazi death camps. Other countries on the relay route like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia would soon be invaded by Germans equipped not with Krupp torches but with Krupp munitions.
But the relay tradition has survived, and China will stage its version, as the Olympics attempts to keep its original spirit on track despite the historical ghosts running alongside.
