LETTER FROM BERLIN

Paris 2024, Los Angeles 2028, Brisbane 2032... so where will the 2036 Olympic Games be held? One city that has thron its hat in the ring is Berlin. The mayor of the German capital, Kai Wegner, confirmed this on Tuesday, November 14, by signing a "memorandum of understanding" to make his bid official – or rather his bid for a bid, since we won't know until next year whether Berlin will in fact enter the race to host the Games.

The last – and only – time the Olympics were held in Berlin was in 1936, three years after Adolf Hitler came to power, and they were used as a showcase for his propaganda. For Wegner, the centenary is "a great opportunity" to show "the new Berlin," a "colorful, diverse and open metropolis" – in other words, the exact opposite of what it was a century ago. "I can imagine the Israeli team entering the same Olympic stadium where, 100 years earlier, the Games were hijacked for political purposes. It would be a second victory over Nazi Germany," he said on November 14.

Not everyone agrees. In 2019, when the idea of Berlin bidding for 2036 began to be discussed, the then interior minister, Horst Seehofer, was clearly opposed. "I can't imagine it. It would open up a terrible debate at international level, and the Olympic idea would be tarnished. How would it be perceived by the rest of the world? Are the Germans celebrating the centenary of the Nazi Games? That's not possible," said the conservative Bavarian in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

His Social Democrat successor, Nancy Faeser, thinks exactly the opposite. Interviewed in May by online media outlet The Pioneer, she said that if Germany were to bid for the 2036 Olympics, the question of "confronting history" would necessarily arise. And that "it is entirely conceivable that this confrontation would take place where the events occurred, where the persecutions and violations of human dignity took place".

Although a number of articles have appeared in various newspapers expressing unease at the idea of Berlin hosting the "centenary games" in a setting that evokes memories of Leni Riefenstahl and her film Olympia, the historical argument is not the main concern for many of those opposing a bid.

This is not to say that the German Olympic Committee does not consider this point important: its president, Stefan Brause, has assured us that the Central Council of Jews in Germany would have a "right of veto" over a potential Berlin bid. The Council has not yet taken a position, believing that "events of this type must be accepted by society as a whole," and that "the debate, for the time being, has not been sufficiently conducted".

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