An odd Olympic moment

I remember Munich in 1973 like it was yesterday. The Olympic stadium (photo) sparkled still, its modern architecture outrageous for that era.

We swam in the holy waters that Mark Spitz had blessed. Sat on hills built from the rubble of World War II. Quit breathing for those brief seconds it takes to get from ground level to the observatory of the Olympic Tower.

I and my equally loquacious teenage friends made the rounds of both levels of that observatory in near silence. We could not see the Alps that day, as it was cold and gray, typical weather for Munich in June. The gigantic city spread out around us, landmarks we could not name, clear and immovable beneath our feet.

The BMW building got us going a bit, with its insistence on merging architecture with marketing. The Frauenkirche’s onion domes reoriented us southwards. And we wondered at the alternation between beautiful old homes built around a Hof, or courtyard, and stark concrete buildings, on the same street, in the same neighborhood. In 1973, I did not know about bombers dropping payload every fifteen seconds, that last gasp that brought a city literally to its knees only twenty-nine years earlier.

“That’s where it happened,” someone said, pointing to the terraced Village below.

I do not remember how long we stood there and stared. It was all so fresh, this “it” that needed no definition. We expected blood stains perhaps, visible from our perch in a spindly tree 900 feet above the ground.

Those days, the great globe of friendship still stood on Olympic soil for travelers like us to sign, to signify how we were united by life on a common surface. Those days, that terraced Village was lifeless, its apartments shuttered, still a crime scene. Those days, we puzzled aloud, asking how something like that could happen. Those days, it truly felt like the ghost of the Shoah had returned to Germany, though the irony was lost on no one that this time, Germans did not play the role of the bad guy.

We bought the ubiquitous posters, glad for the distraction. Like the stadium itself, those 1972 Olympic posters broke new ground in sports art. Bright, happy, shocking colors, Munich’s images lingered, and we could for a moment admire the gymnast suspended between two rings, the basketball hovering on the rim, decked out in lime and orange and blasts of yellow. Colors chosen because they belong to no national flag. Symbols chosen — the by-now familiar sports pictograms — to bridge the remotest languages and cultures.

These days, now more than fifty years later, everything has changed. The brazen globe of friendship disappeared, likely relegated to a museum, hopes for peace and no-war intact. The terraced Village knows the blood of scraped knees and paper cuts, infused with noise of daily Being. Ghosts have not inhabited the place for many years. The Olympic complex teems with swimmers who could not identify Mark Spitz even if they had a lifeline, with things to do, places to go, concerts, and general pleasant confusion. And we have learned that at least some of those sturdy German policemen allegedly abandoned their posts, assisting in the slaughter of Jewish athletes by their conspicuous absence.

Yet those Olympic posters still sing. Subsequent years have brought many imitators of their style and substance, leaving them feeling less original than they are. Even lacking novelty, there is beauty on that paper, and their colors still startle and amaze.

“You do know Otl Aicher designed the 1972 Olympic posters, don’t you?” The quiet, silver-haired teacher reverently returned the coffee table book of Aicher’s aerial photographs to her bookcase.

Gustel Saur had known Otl since they were both children. Her twin brothers had done jail time in the late 1930s for belonging to a Catholic youth group instead of Hitler Youth. And they had held Otl Aicher in absolute awe.

Otl had refused to join Hitler Youth. This woman’s brothers had eventually put their names on Hitler Youth rolls, to stay out of jail, and to be able to attend the university (in Ulm, that required proof of Hitler Youth membership).

But Otl had refused to join Hitler Youth. From the time he was eleven or twelve years old, he suffered daily beatings, bloody beatings, by gangs of hoodlums in brown and white. His family, except for his sister who likewise endured beatings, had embraced Nazi philosophy. As a child, he was a stranger in his own home. Otl Aicher was a top-notch student, and he was not allowed to go to college.

When the German army drafted him, he ran away. They caught up with him and gave him the choice between a concentration camp and the army. He joined (and wrote in his memoirs that he considered himself a coward for having done so), then deserted shortly thereafter, living the last couple of years of the war on the run, hiding in forests and on remote farms.

I knew of Otl because of his association with the White Rose. He was never directly involved in their resistance activities, as he was generally underground. In a touching bit of irony, he was home on medical leave (he had convinced army physicians that he had hepatitis) in early 1943, and in fact had been sent to caution them that the Gestapo was on to their work. But his meeting to warn them of imminent danger was scheduled for lunchtime on February 18, 1943, and they were arrested a couple of hours earlier.

I puzzled for a very long time over the connection between Otl Aicher and those Olympics. Was this solely about his bad luck? After all, as a high school student, a radical Catholic periodical called Hochland [Highland] had accepted a piece he submitted. The editor, Dr. Carl Muth, ranked high on the Nazi hit list; Muth had been excommunicated in the early 1900s for promoting separation of church and state in Germany, reinstated due to his popularity and following. Otl got his big break, and the Nazis banned the periodical a couple of months before his piece was to appear.

These days, when I look at Otl’s pictures, framed and hanging on my office walls, I think of him, I think of his friends who died under the Nazi guillotine on February 22, July 13, and October 12, 1943. And I think of Jewish athletes proudly representing a country that had only recently blown out twenty-five candles on a millennia-old birthday cake. I think of needless death caused by those wedded to violence.

And I know that the question, why do bad things happen to good people, is as old as the human race. We may not be able to delete the question from our social database, but we may indeed continue to admire the lime greens and sizzling pinks that celebrate good people who refused to bow, good people who continue to refuse to bow, who stand for justice, who live despite the why.

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© 2025 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to quote. Image credits: Olympiapark, Tiia Monto, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. Note that Otl's posters are neither public domain nor Creative Commons. You can easily see examples of his colorful designs here. My favorite, the one in my office, features basketball.

The above information, including more about the interview with Gustel Saur, is fully footnoted in our White Rose histories. Please purchase them for access to that material! To order digital version of White Rose History, Volume I: Coming Together (January 1933-April 30, 1942), click here. To order digital version of White Rose History, Volume II, click here. WRH1 is © 2002, 2003, 2007 by Denise Elaine Heap. WRH2 is © 2002, 2007 by Denise Elaine Heap.

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