Authors: Christopher Hilton
He still has his autograph book and its sixty signatures. ‘Here is a Finn … he was often world champion … Volmaro Iso-Hollo. Here is Robert Clark … second in the decathlon … and this looks like Willy Johnson … must be an American as well. H. Uhland? Well those names, you know, it’s difficult to read them. And this is the name of someone I’m told is still alive … an Egyptian. I can even remember that one. There were several of us German boys standing there and one of them tried to teach this Egyptian the German letters. There were five shops in the reception building – a photographer’s shop, a stationer’s, a sportsgoods shop, I think a fruit and vegetable shop and one selling sweets. This Egyptian took the boy who had taught him the letters to the photographer’s shop and bought him some present. Some wrote the sports they were in, like boxing. An American wrote “1,500-metre-runner”… here is an Indian … the captain of their hockey team … Dhyan Chand.’
46
On another winter morning, moving towards the seventh decade, the mist of dawn lingers, shrouding each shape in a gentle, timeless embrace so that somehow they are all still there; yet, of course, they cannot still be there.
The athletes’ achievements live on, but that most malign of shadows is just that….
Imagine a huge area of flat parkland decorated by carefully planted trees. Imagine, at strategic points across this parkland, the structures of heavy stone which still harmonise with the distant city of heavy stone.
The stadium, now with a roof for the 2006 World Football Cup, remains genuinely breathtaking in its symmetry and scale, the walls – like freshly cleaned granite – curving in an endless cliff face. The trekkers on 1 August 1936 had exactly the same reaction when they were confronted with it and the knowledge that Hitler really was coming.
Temporary fencing guards it as teams of construction workers in hard hats continue the renovations and alterations: there’s an air of quiet, controlled activity, more work in progress than building site.
The bell tower is so tall it looms above the mist but weeds grow in the tiers of stone seats beside it. The
Platz
where the motorcade drew up retains its original configuration but the gates through which Hitler entered have long since gone.
The bell, cracked and with a shell hole in it, has been taken to the House of German Sport half a mile the other side of the stadium where it stands beside some steps. The House is three-sided with a grassy area in the middle – and, inevitably, heroic statues on plinths – with the Cupola Hall at one end. Renovation is going on here, too, making it hard to recapture the living dramas of the fencing.
The Friesenhaus, where the women stayed, is joined to it and is also made of heavy stone. Here Hertha BSC, the football club that uses the Olympic stadium for its home matches, has offices. The entrance and reception are decked out with pennants and pictures of the players. What were once ground-floor bedrooms are now offices with their mandatory computer screens.
The entrance to the hockey stadium, off the Olympia Platz, is padlocked. The Platz, broad and level and leading to the stadium, still has the columns of tall, white poles which bore the flags of so many nations. This November day the Platz’s central reservation is being used as a training ground for motor-cyclists and their instructors. It’s big enough to accommodate them easily.
These shapes and spaces in the mist retain a studious grandeur; they have classical proportions and they still fulfil their original, cumulative purpose: to take your breath away. The stadium continues to have this impact regardless of the fact that the world has grown accustomed to immense stadiums so that now this is only one among many. It’s difficult to say quite why the impact remains: perhaps it has to do with the perfect proportions; perhaps the imposing stonework; perhaps the knowledge that in August 1936 the world of sport had seen nothing to equal it; perhaps because here a poor black American sharecropper’s son brought the potential of the human body to an astonishing, immortal climax. Or perhaps because with hindsight we know what cataclysmic events came afterwards. Or maybe because Hitler built it and strode into it at a time when he truly stood at the centre of the world.
Well, all of those things.
Just off the Olympic Platz a narrow path, trees and bushes to one side, stretches away to the railway station. Camouflaged by the growth of the bushes it’s easy to miss the old, white sign
HERREN
and round a corner the old, blue sign
DAMEN
: two of the public toilets just as they were – closed these many decades and now daubed with graffiti, bringing them into the modern era. Curious.
Here on the narrow path you feel close to 1936 in a way you cannot anywhere else. Here is the human dimension.
This winter’s day you can follow the route from the stadium out to the Olympic Village, the same route the buses took as they transported the competitors to and fro on the old Hamburg road. Once you are clear of Charlottenburg you go to Staaken and after Staaken there’s a necklace of snug, solid hamlets strung along the highway. Because they fell into the Soviet Zone time passed them by: main streets of cobblestones and sharp cambers, modest houses, hardly a shop anywhere, men on old bicycles, tractors leaving their tyre prints in drying mud. If any competitors in 1936 gazed from the buses this is what they must have seen, and sentimental Westerners, returning when the Wall came down, said
Yes, this is the Germany I remember from my childhood.
Once upon a time the ‘original landscape … with its elevations, pine, oak and birch trees, the picturesque valley of an old watercourse and the meadow-like open fields … provided the most favourable conditions imaginable for its planning, and the wooded hills surrounding the small valley offered natural confines.’
47
The Soviet Army built ranks of prefabricated four-storey apartments in the open fields between the cottages and lived in them until, in 1991–2, the soldiers were withdrawn to Volgograd as Germany reunited. They took everything they could (well, it did belong to them), leaving only the empty shells of the apartment blocks to the ravages of time.
When you pull off the highway you’re in woodland and, suddenly, an estate of orange-painted apartment blocks comes into view – they were the barracks temporarily vacated to accommodate the sportsmen who couldn’t be housed in the Village. Behind them there’s a perimeter fence and more woodland. Through it you can see grey shapes among the trees, the apartments and cottages of the Village.
Everything is where it was and nothing is the same as it was. This is ghostland, nature reclaiming what was taken from it – weeds grow between the joints of the concrete blocks which made, and make, the roadways, undergrowth creeps towards the cottages in one final advance. All the windows are boarded up as if they are blind now. The pathways, once so neat, still wend their way through the trees, linking cottage to cottage, but they’re bruised and broken.
Nothing stirs, nothing moves.
Something is moving in the background, however, as well as the good work of the Historia Elstal Association. The Deutsche Kreditbank AG has set up a foundation which now owns the Village – it must have been interesting to ascertain who owned it before, since it passed from Nazi Germany to Soviet then East German control (where private property was abolished), never mind the Soviet Army who requisitioned it.
Barbara Eisenhuth of the Bank explains, ‘We are going to install a museum of Olympic history and sport. We want to show this area to as many people as possible and we are organising some events in 2006. We hope many tourists will come to the Village.’ But even if extensive renovation is carried out every tourist will need imagination.
The 3,000 young men from fifty-one countries who walked these very paths under these very trees, now grown so tall, and gazed through these same windows, who played in those clearings and trained on that very track, made this secluded, pastoral and wooded meeting point somewhere, in the history of human sporting endeavour, precious.
In the Village any of the 3,000 could approach anyone else and spend as long as they liked with them. ‘We did not talk on these occasions. We used the most primitive method of signs and gestures. These were quite sufficient for us to carry on our simple, healthy conversations.’
48
Now, empty and silent, it is a private place; anyone who goes there is alone with his thoughts, with images and echoes from the seven decades past.
It ought to be timeless, but not for any of those reasons.
Here, when it could not have been more public, the youth of the world prepared to board the shuttle buses – pug-nosed
Wehrmacht
buses, commandeered for the purpose. Those buses pulled up just over there and went via the necklace of hamlets, on past Staaken and then all those long since departed competitors confronted, in peaceful combat, their destinies: the few – like Jesse Owens – to be touched by greatness, the majority to return on those same buses as anonymous as when they had left those few hours before; and would be anonymous forever, their unique moment gone, the great darkness of war drawing ever closer.
This place knew Hitler on one of those June days before August – in uniform of course, striding along inspecting, his entourage in tow, also in uniform, of course. Here, on another of those June days, Goebbels would come, looking shifty in raincoat and homburg hat and wondering, no doubt, how best the Village might be exploited. It knew the tide of refugees Hitler’s war brought to it and the eventual brutal division of Germany into two independent countries created by arbitrary boundaries which – fantastically (and only officially) – hated each other,
this
side of Staaken and that side. It knew occupation by Hitler’s ‘sub-humans’ from the east. It saw the breathless embrace of reunification when the Wall fell and then the retreat to Volgograd as the 1990s dawned and the last of the Soviet military vehicles lumbered away. It knew, finally, precious privacy.
Today the Village stands as a memory of all those things, but it also stands for something to set against all those things, too: that people from every corner of the world and every background – race, creed, colour, religion – really could, and really can, meet and compete at the most intense level, and nobody dies.
The Hindenburghaus near the entrance acted as a social meeting point for everybody. The Indian team can be regarded as representative, not because they won the hockey gold medal but because they were a group of such varied backgrounds united by the Olympic circumstances. They remembered how ‘we were entertained to pictures and occasional dancing, acrobatic feats or jugglery. Every evening after dinner, we used to pass two hours in the house, with our sweatsuits on or any other informal dress, cheering, clapping and joking. The Italians were the most noisy and none could beat them in this respect. A sight of a pretty girl dancing gracefully was always enough to rouse our Italian friends to the highest pitch of enjoyment….’
49
If you stand by yourself on any of the overgrown paths and listen, I swear you can still hear the echoes from those August days vaulting across the bitter decades, can hear the sound the youth of the world made.
It is laughter.
Notes
1
.
Lewis H. Carlson and John J. Fogarty,
Tales of Gold
(Chicago, IL, Contemporary Books, 1987), p. 152.
2
.
Albert Speer,
Inside the Third Reich
(London, Sphere, 1979), p. 116.
3
.
Stephanie Daniels and Anita Tedder,
‘A Proper Spectacle’ – Women Olympians 1900–1936
(Houghton Conquest, Beds., ZeNaNa Press, 2000), p. 101.
4
.
Paul Yogi Mayer,
Jews in the Olympic Games
(London, Valentine Mitchell, 2004), p. 107.
5
.
William J. Baker,
Jesse Owens, An American Life
(New York, The Free Press, 1986), p. 118.
6
.
www.athletics.mcgill.ca/varsity_sports_player_profile.ch2?athlete_id=959
(visited 19 October 2005).
7
.
Carlson and Fogarty,
Tales of Gold
, pp. 151, 175
8
.
Marty Glickman with Stan Isaacs,
The Fastest Kid on the Block
(Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1996).
9
.
John Woodruff; interview with author.
10
.
US Official Olympic report.
11
.
en.olympic.cn/games/summer/2004-03-27/121663.html (visited 22 September 2005).
12
.
www.cishsydney2005.org/images/ST25-PAPER%20FOR%20 ICHSC%20(SAKAUE).doc
(visited 24 October 2005).
13
.
Ibid
.
14
.
Ibid
.
15
.
Christine Duerksen Sant, ‘“Genuine German Girls”: The Nazi Portrayal of its Sportswomen of the 1936 Berlin Olympics’, p. 115. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Winston-Salem, Wake Forest University, 2000.
16
.
Ibid
.
17
.
Ibid
., p. 116.
18
.
Gretel Bergmann; interview with author.
19
.
www.adpf.asso.fr/adpf-publi/folio/olympisme/hommages.html
(visited 14 April 2005).
20
.
Ibid
.
21
.
www.aafla.org/SportsLibrary/Olympika/Olympika_1994/olympika0301g.pdf
22
.
frankwykoff2.com/foy_draper2.htm (visited 22 October 2005).
23
.
www.webenetics.com/hungary/olympic_1936.htm
(visited 18 April 2005).