In January, as Hamas prepared to release Israeli hostages held in Gaza as part of a ceasefire deal brokered with Israel, U.S. movie theaters began showing a new film about a different—but no less notorious—Israeli hostage crisis.
The joint U.S.-German production September 5 takes place almost entirely during the course of one day at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, when Palestinian militants entered the Olympic Village before dawn, killed two members of the Israeli delegation, and took nine others hostage. After an hours-long standoff that involved negotiations with German mediators, all the hostages, numerous militants, and one police officer were killed in a firefight at a military airport near Munich.
September 5, a contender for Best Original Screenplay at this year’s Academy Awards, aims to provide a journalistic angle on the tragedy, which has featured in a few Hollywood productions in the last three decades. Set mostly in the ABC studios at the Munich Olympic Park, the film follows a team of sports journalists as they scramble to cover the political events of the day. It integrates the network’s archival footage of the attacks to “engage with how we consume news,” particularly “crisis reporting,” director Tim Fehlbaum said in a pre-recorded interview that followed a screening.
The Munich Olympics were the first to be broadcast live, making the hostage crisis the first act of terrorism that the world watched in real time. Fehlbaum called Munich a “turning point in media history.” More people tuned into that day’s coverage than that of the moon landing three years earlier. September 5 both appears true to the times and accurately reflects newsroom discussions during a crisis. For journalists, however, the questions that the movie raises—for example, whom to label as terrorists—are hardly new.
Although the media stands in the foreground of September 5, the film offers an equally keen look at German identity formation after World War II. Organizers intended for the Munich Olympics to rectify West Germany’s standing in the world, portraying an erstwhile pariah state as a changed and welcoming place. Yet Fehlbaum depicts how the “cheerful Games” instead highlighted the limits of the country’s inflexible and ideologically driven approach to postwar security policy. Anecdotes interspersed throughout the film plant the seeds for as-yet-unresolved debates in modern Germany about defense and military readiness.
Leonie Benesch stars as Marianne Gebhardt in “September 5.”Paramount Pictures
Fehlbaum distills the German public’s response to the Munich tragedy into one character: Marianne Gebhardt, who is played by Leonie Benesch. She is the only German journalist (and German speaker) working in the ABC studios. As a result, Gebhardt is tasked with interpreting reports from German police, media, and politicians for ABC’s crew, keeping them up to date on developments in the hostage crisis and sometimes advising them on German culture, too.
Unlike other characters in the film, Gebhardt is not based on a historical figure. Instead, she is a “representative of Germany at the time,” Benesch told IndieWire last September—and a younger woman in a cast of mostly men.
Early in September 5, Gebhardt demonstrates that she is both deeply sensitive to Germany’s past and idealistic about the country’s potential. Before the hostage crisis begins, Marvin Bader—a Jewish American journalist played by Ben Chaplin—greets Gebhardt brusquely, hinting that her parents could been complacent about the Holocaust and implicating her by extension. Gebhardt compassionately but confidently replies: “Well, I’m not them.”
This exchange occurs while monitors in ABC’s studios show the Israeli team visiting Dachau concentration camp in the suburbs of Munich. Among the athletes that the network interviews is David Berger, an American-born Israeli weightlifter who is later held hostage and killed. An ABC staffer comments on the discomfort of what it must be like for the Israeli athletes “to win a gold in Hitler’s backyard.” At the time of the Munich Olympics, the end of World War II was just 27 years in the past.
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The ABC team clearly understands the significance of the Munich Games, but they struggle in connecting this historical proximity to German authorities’ general incompetence during the hostage crisis—on both a strategic and an emotional level. Again, Gebhardt serves as an interlocutor.
As the crisis begins—“Someone is on the balcony, wearing some kind of mask!”—many ABC staffers are exasperated. They are incredulous about the idea that the Olympic Village featured scant security measures and no armed police, who could have in theory prevented the militants’ entry or mobilized a faster response. To this, Gebhardt says, “I guess they didn’t want the world to be reminded of the last time armed Germans patrolled the streets.”
Gebhardt does not make a judgment as to whether the presence of armed police would have been appropriate in Munich. But she highlights a fundamental tension in German security policy—both domestic and international—that still exists today: When so much of the country’s history is rooted in military and police atrocities, how can modern Germany correct course while still assuming the basic defensive responsibilities of a state?
It can’t, many Germans and much of the international community initially assumed; instead, Germany needed to demilitarize. Although West Germany’s conservative government joined NATO in 1955, the move was remarkably contentious and not supported by the opposition Social Democrats. Even as a member of the alliance, Germany’s Nazi legacy has led the country to be more pacifist vis-à-vis policing and the military than many of its European and North American counterparts, with strict rules about the engagement of German troops and minimal military spending.
A still from “September 5.”Paramount Pictures
This restraint was and is well-intentioned. But it has increasingly clashed with Germany’s practical security needs—not to mention that it has only been able to endure for so long thanks to the U.S. military’s vast presence across Germany. Though many Germans claim to be peaceniks, they cultivated that identity while enjoying reliable protection from U.S. troops (or in the case of East Germany, Soviet forces).
In September 5, this tension bubbles to the surface. Hours into the hostage crisis, angry ABC staffers struggle to understand why German soldiers have not been deployed to the Munich Olympic Village. Gebhardt defiantly answers that, per Germany’s postwar constitution, the military cannot be active on home soil during peacetime—effectively shutting down the discussion.
Decades later, in the same city, then-German President Joachim Gauck sought to puncture the black-and-white mentality that Gebhardt embodies. In a speech at the 2014 Munich Security Conference, Gauck issued a plea for Germany to “assume greater responsibility” in security and defense. “The post-war generations had reasons to be distrustful—of the German state and of German society,” he said. “But the time for such categorical distrust is past.”
Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine moved Gauck’s demands further into the mainstream—and U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s comments disparaging European leaders at this year’s Munich Security Conference have provided yet another jolt for the continent to take more responsibility for its own security.
But the shifts that Gauck proposed a decade ago remain controversial; Germany’s Feb. 23 election was in part a referendum on the country’s growing security clout. As just one example, three of Germany’s seven main parties—the far-right Alternative for Germany, the populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, and The Left—oppose continued weapons exports to Ukraine and prefer that Germany promote diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict. Factions within those groups are skeptical of NATO, too. Together, they earned around 35 percent of the vote.
Amid these political debates, September 5 has a realist value-add. The film’s portrayal of German authorities’ failure to prevent the biggest tragedy in Olympic history is a reminder of the danger of rigidly idealist traps, both in worldview and policy. Although Germany committed to disarmament and restraint with good intentions, a lack of basic security preparedness almost certainly led to further bloodshed in Munich.
“Innocent people died in Germany again. And we failed,” Gebhardt says before the credits roll. Viewers may wonder whether now, faced with 21st-century realities, Germany’s next act might include more nuance.