"Zu Gast bei Freunden"
How the Federal Republic of Germany learned to take sport seriously
During the 1950s, policy makers in the Federal Republic of Germany, haunted by memories of the 1936 Olympics, endeavoured to keep politics out of sport. However, this position became untenable as the German Democratic Republic increasingly used sport for ideological capital. Under pressure from both the West German public and national and international politics, the Federal German government increasingly rose to the East German challenge. This culminated in the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, where the “modern Germany” was presented as a peace-loving, democratic, and European nation.
