Book Review: Berlin 1936

Berlin 1936: Sixteen Days in August
Oliver Hilmes
History, biography, sports

Berlin 1936 is a rather unusual book. I can imagine it might not be to everyone's taste. I liked it a lot, though.

"The Nazi Olympics" are famous as the occasion of Jesse Owens's on-field heroics, which are (and were) widely understood as having giving Hitler the metaphorical finger. The rest of the scene is treated as background--or reported in the newspaper-like tones used for any sporting event. Berlin 1936 flips all of this around. The book is a series of vignettes, told in the present tense and taken from a broad swath of lives both famous and obscure. Some of the actors appear once and vanish. Others weave into and out of the story: the American author Thomas Wolfe, Joseph Goebbels, the club owner Leon Henri Dajou. Owens is there, but he's one among many.

The theme of the book is not athletics, but contrast. Hilmes does a rather fine job in showing Berlin as the visitors saw it, as the Nazis wanted it to be seen--and then showing the ugly, underlying truth. The spectacle--not only of the games, but of Berlin itself--was deliberate: bait for the gaze of the world. Dangled in front of the visitors and the newsreel cameras, it pulled their eyes away from such nasty facts as Hitler's recent treaty violations, the race laws, and the burgeoning concentration camps. It worked, too.*

I can't say that Berlin 1936 is a book for everyone. It's novelistic (and should appeal to lovers of historical fiction). The present-tense prose makes the book more immediate--there's a sense of not knowing how it all comes out--but it's obviously a stylistic device. Substantively, while the book is well-researched and end-noted, it makes no pretense of completeness; it's no substitute, for example, for a straight, rigorous history book. There are no hard numbers and not much in the way of historical context. Ordinary Berliners are present, but they're at the margins, and they fade away entirely as the book continues.

. . . which, I think, is part of Hilmes's point. In Hitler's Germany, ordinary individual German didn't count for much. They were just grist for the mill--obscured by Olympic razzle-dazzle--and ultimately mere fodder for armies. In much same way, the virulently anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer was kept off the streets for sixteen days, the rhetoric was muted, the press coverage was orchestrated in fine detail, the swing bands were given plenty of leeway, the nightlife was permitted to roar. Hilmes does a nice job in showing the frothy surface, while periodically puncturing it. To complain that this book reads like a guide to Berlin glitz (as one or two reviewers have done) completely misses the point.

*Comparisons with the current World Cup in Moscow are left as an exercise for the reader.