Quote of the Day (Philip Kerr, on Jesse Owens Thwarting an Early Attempt at Olympic Marketing)

“At the gun Jesse Owens was away to a good start, and by the first thirty metres he was powering fluently into a clear lead. In the seat next to me the matron was on her feet again. She had been wrong, I thought, to describe Owens as a gazelle. Watching the tall, graceful negro accelerate down the track, making a mockery of crackpot theories of Aryan superiority, I thought that Owens was nothing so much as a Man, for whom other men were simply a painful embarrassment. To run like that was the meaning of the earth, and if ever there was a master-race, it was certainly not going to exclude someone like Jesse Owens. His victory drew a tremendous cheer from the German crowd, and I found it comforting that the only race they were shouting about was the one they had just seen. Perhaps, I thought, Germany did not want to go to war after all. I looked towards that part of the stadium that was reserved for Hitler and other senior party officials, to see if they were present to witness the depth of popular sentiment being demonstrated on behalf of the black American. But of the leaders of the Third Reich there was no still sign.”—British mystery novelist Philip Kerr (1956-2018), March Violets (1989)

I am not the type of person to sit in front of a TV for a fortnight to watch the Olympics. But there are evidently enough such people to lead host countries to consider it a golden marketing opportunity to showcase their sites to potential tourists worldwide.

You can almost see, for instance, French officials wide-eyed at the possibility of holding the opening ceremonies at this year’s Olympics on the Seine River. 

Who needs a clunky ol’ stadium when you could have the traditional parade of athletes this time on boats sailing on the “lifeblood of Paris”—all surely presaging throngs booking flights with romantic cruises in mind?

The preparation to make this all happen—the necessity to make the high cost of hosting the games pay off without the slightest blemish—is enormous. It’s especially so if you consider the event not just a marketing opportunity but a potential propaganda bonanza, as Nazi Germany did in the summer of 1936.

It started with the construction of a spanking-new stadium and state-of-the-art village for housing the athletes, with Leni Riefenstahl directing (in a production overseen by Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry) the documentary Olympia.

But, as Philip Kerr makes clear periodically in his marvelous detective novel set during this period, March Violets, cleaning up Berlin’s omnipresent signs of intolerance extended to taking down display cases for the notoriously anti-Semitic journal Der Stermer.

“It’s for the Olympiad,” a couple of workers tell Kerr’s German stand-in for Philip Marlowe, Bernie Gunther. “We’re ordered to take them all down so as not to shock the foreign visitors who will be coming to Berlin to see the Games.”

Even books normally censored by the regime, Gunther learns later, are allowed to appear in shops for the duration of the Olympics.

The campaign to showcase the Aryan “master race” didn’t work out quite as the Nazis planned.  German athletes came away with the most medals of any country, but that wasn’t enough for Goebbels.  He grumbled in his diary after the second day of competition, about the electrifying performance of African-American runner Jesse Owens:

"We Germans won a gold medal, the Americans three, of which two were Negroes. That is a disgrace. White people should be ashamed of themselves."

Overall, though, the games succeeded in whitewashing Hitler’s totalitarian regime. Most visitors saw no confirmation of the various reports they’d read in newspapers or heard on the radio about mistreatment of Jews.

Increasingly, 21^st-century authoritarian regimes like Russia and China hope that hosting the Olympics will scrub their image clean as thoroughly as the Berlin games. As Victor Matheson and Andrew Zimbalist note in this April 2021 article for the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, voters in a number of Western democracies, given the choice in referendums, are rebelling at the “spiraling costs and…financial risks that the Olympics place on host cities.”

Russia’s Vladimir Putin had no such compunctions about holding the events in Sochi in 2014, nor did China’s Xi Jinping with Beijing two years ago. 

It’s citizens of those countries who have had to swallow in silence the systematic harassment, disappearances, and deportations of anyone daring to question what it takes to make ugly authoritarian look picture-perfect for a world audience.

Quote of the Day (John F. Kennedy, Defining the Cold War in Berlin)

“There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass' sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin.”—John F. Kennedy, speech at Rudolph Wilde Platz, West Berlin, June 26, 1963

We in the West—and, I suspect, especially the citizens of the great divided city of the Cold War—know this address, delivered 50 years ago today, better as the “Ich bin Ein Berliner” speech, a reference to its most famous line.

On the printed page, it was only eight paragraphs long. It only takes nine minutes to watch it on YouTube. But, like another address given a century before, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, John F. Kennedy showed that it did not take many words to define memorably the essence of a tragic conflict.

The section I’ve quoted here uses the same device that Lincoln did at Gettysburg: Epistrophe, or the repetition of the same word or words at the end of successive phrases, clauses or sentences. It’s part of Kennedy’s general strategy of refuting the claims of the Soviet Union and its Western apologists during the Cold War. He used the great symbolism--and sorry actuality--of the Berlin Wall to imply an entire world of differences between the Soviet Bloc and the free world with that simple sentence, "Let them come to Berlin." In the process, he gave hope to hundreds of thousands on the fault line between the East and West--people who had known precious little of it over the prior few decades, as their nation lurched from one totalitarian system to another.

Though less famous than many other lines in the speech, the following gains particular resonance because the outcome the American President predicted—so hard to see then—has come true:

“When all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great Continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe. When that day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades.”

With good reason, Canadian broadcaster and diplomatic L. Ian MacDonald, editor of Policy Options, has noted, in an op-ed piece for the Montreal Gazette: “No speech in modern times has proven more prescient or consequential.”