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 (Ernest Hemingway, on Why Snow Was Beautiful in Paris)

“Snow is never more beautiful than in the city. It is wonderful in Paris to stand on a bridge across the Seine looking up through the softly curtaining snow past the grey bulk of the Louvre, up the river spanned by many bridges and bordered by the grey houses of old Paris to where Notre Dame squats in the dusk. It is very beautiful in Paris and very lonely at Christmas time.” —American fiction writer and Nobel Prize laureate Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), “Christmas at the Roof of the World,” Toronto Star Weekly, Dec. 22, 1923, collected in By-Line Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, edited by William White (1967)

(The image accompanying this post shows Hemingway with F. Scott Fitzgerald, frenemy and fellow American expatriate in 1920s Paris.)

Quote of the Day (Honore de Balzac, on the Conversational Charms of a Parisian Salon)

“Ingenious repartee, subtle observations, sparkling gibes, pictures painted with brilliant clarity came thick and fast in a spontaneous, effervescent rush, offered up without arrogance or artifice, spoken with sincerity, and savored with delight. Above all, the guests shone by their refinement and their inventiveness, which were nothing short of artistic. You will find elegant manners elsewhere in Europe—you will find cordiality, bonhomie, sophistication—but only in Paris, in this salon, and in those of whom I’ve just spoken, does there flourish the special wit that gives all these social virtues a pleasing, multifaceted unity, a sort of fluvial momentum by which that profusion of musings, aphorisms, tales, and pages from history wend their way in an easy and untrammeled flow. Paris alone, the capital of taste, possesses the secret that makes of conversation a joust, in which every temperament is encapsulated in a quip, in which each has his say, all his experience condensed in a word, in which all find amusement, refreshment, and exercise. And only there, too, will you truly exchange your ideas; there you will not, like the dolphin in the fable, carry a monkey on your shoulders; there you will be understood, with no danger of wagering gold against pot metal. Secrets artfully betrayed, exchanges both light and deep, everything undulates, spins, changes luster and color with each passing sentence. Keen judgments and breathless narrations follow one upon the next. Every eye listens, every gesture is a question, every glance an answer…. Never did the phenomenon of speech, to which, when carefully studied and skillfully wielded, an actor or storyteller owes his glory, cast so overpowering a spell on me….But if these things are told with all their candor intact, all their natural forthrightness, all their illusory aimlessness, perhaps you will fully grasp the charm of a true French party, captured at the moment when the sweetest companionship makes everyone forget his own interests, his exclusive self-love, or, if you like, his pretensions.”—French novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), “Another Study of Womankind” (1842, translated by Jordan Stump) in The Human Comedy: Selected Stories (2014)

Quote of the Day (Irwin Shaw, on a Lonely American in Paris)

“From the stories he had heard from other young Americans in Paris, it had never occurred to Tibbell that he would have to face so many nights of loneliness and vague, unformed yearning once he had established himself in the city. But he was shy with girls and clumsy with men and he saw now that shyness and clumsiness were exportable articles that passed from country to country without tax or quota restrictions and that a solitary man was as likely to find himself alone and unremarked in Paris as in New York. Each night, after a silent dinner with only a book for companion, Tibbell, with his neat American haircut, his uncreased, neat Dacron suit, his naïve, questing, blue, polite American eyes, would go from one crowded terrasse of St. Germain to another, drinking as little as he dared, waiting for the one brilliant night when he would be noticed by some glorious, laughing band of young people who, with the legendary freedom of the capital, would seize upon him, appreciate him, sweep him along with them in their expeditions among the joyous tables of the Flore, the Epi Club, the Brasserie Lipp and out to the gay and slightly sinful inns in the smiling green countryside beyond Paris.

“But the one brilliant night never arrived.”—American novelist and short-story master Irwin Shaw (1913-1984), “Love on a Dark Street,” in Short Stories: Five Decades (1978)

In a prior post, I wrote about the classic story “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” But that much-anthologized bit of short fiction hardly encapsulates the full achievement of Irwin Shaw. The short story quoted above, written nearly a quarter century after “Girls,” gives as poignant a picture as I can think of a young person alone in a city and aching hopelessly for love. (The title alone was evocative and haunting enough to do double duty as the name for his 1965 collection of short stories written over the prior decade.)

In a foreword to a later edition of the “Five Decades” story collection, the late critic Alfred Kazin wrote of Shaw’s “inability to separate himself from a particular time.” What was meant as an appreciation comes off as a half-apology. No, in fact, the emotions that Shaw depicts so skillfully  are universal, crossing entire ages, for all searchers mentally marooned out of their comfort zone, longing for an emotional anchor.

Quote of the Day (Ernest Hemingway, on the Allied Liberation of Paris)

“I had a funny choke in my throat and I had to clean my glasses because there now, below us, gray and always beautiful, was spread the city I love best in all the world.”—Ernest Hemingway, “How We Came to Paris,” Colliers, October 7, 1944, reprinted in Reporting World War II, Part Two: American Journalism 1944-46 (Library of America edition, 1995)

If you want a sense of the jubilation on the streets of Paris on this date in 1944, when French troops walked into their city at last, having put (with the help of the Allies) the Nazis on the run, then Irwin Shaw’s essay, “Morts pour la Patrie,” is the one to read. And you can’t read Ernest Hemingway’s return to war correspondence without feeling that his work had become less about the world he was encountering and more about him.

Be that as it may, the love affair that “Papa” Hemingway bore for Paris, from his young manhood all the way to his death, makes this must reading. Knowing that relationship—one he celebrated in A Movable Feast—will leave you, too, with a lump in the throat by the end of the piece.

Hemingway had had it in for “the Krauts,” as he called them, for commandeering one of his favorite bars and turning it quarters for Nazi generals. He couldn’t wait to liberate the bar at the Ritz hotel.

Legend has it that the lubricated author jumped out of his jeep, saying he’d come to liberate the Ritz. Manager Claude Azello, who’d known him for a long time, got him to leave his gun by the door and celebrate with champagne.