Anschlag auf Olympia. Was 1972 in München wirklich geschah

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. The planners hadn’t yet reached today’s belief in banning cars from city centres, but rather took the functional separation of Le Corbusier to the next stage, by sending cars underground and reserving the open spaces for pedestrians, just like they were two a decade later in Louvain-la-Neuve, the Belgian university city planned and build to host the francophone half of the old Catholic University of Leuven who had been expelled thence following the events of 1968 (where 1968 didn’t mean the same as in the rest of the global West). My pictures from that warm summer evening—during a summer regularly featuring the highest temperatures recorded to date—seem to have captured what I felt during that evening walk.2. There is a curious reticence in Germany to use the army for domestic security purposes, usually backed up by woolly references to ‘German history’. Such explanations are flawed, as Hitler did not take power through a military coup, while the big street fights of the Weimar Republic were carried out by heavily armoured and motorised police forces, not the army, yet the taboo persists, although mass-scale repression through troops has not happened since 1848.