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ABSTRACT
This essay offers a comparative analysis of the reception of ancient Greece at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the 1948 London Olympics. Focusing specifically on the respective Games’ torch relays and official films, it explores the ways that the contrasting messages of the 1936 and 1948 Games as a whole were advanced through symbolic engagement with Greek antiquity. In 1936, the torch relay and the subsequent film (Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia) invoked Greek antiquity in the service of zealous nationalism, positioning Nazi Germany as the living embodiment of the glorious legacy of ancient Greece. In 1948, on the other hand, the relay and film (Castleton Knight’s XIVth Olympiad: The Glory of Sport) portrayed ancient Greece as a benign example from the distant past toward which all modern-day nations could turn for inspiration in dealing with each other in peace. Ultimately, what makes this 1948 attempt to pacify Nazi Germany’s 1936 Olympic Hellenism even more interesting is that it was only partially successful: although London 1948 stripped away the spirit of Nazism from certain classicised elements of Berlin 1936, there also remained an unsettling coherence between the Olympic messaging of pre-war Germany and post-war Britain.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Nigel Spivey for his guidance and kindness, as well as Michael Squire, Carrie Vout, and the two referees for their thoughtful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Michael Mackenzie, ‘From Athens to Berlin: The 1936 Olympics and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia’, Critical Inquiry 29, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 317.
2 Richard D. Mandell, The Nazi Olympics (London: Souvenir Press, 1971), xi.
3 Scott Venters, ‘“Would You Die for the Fatherland?” Disciplining the German Commemorative Body’, Theatre History Studies 35 (2016): 58.
4 Toon Van Houdt, ‘The Imperfect Body in Nazi Germany: Ancient Concepts, Modern Technologies’, in Disability in Antiquity, ed. Christian Laes, (London: Routledge, 2016), 475–6; Iain Boyd Whyte, ‘National Socialism, Classicism, and Architecture’, in Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, ed. Helen Roche and Kyriakos N. Demetriou (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 420–3.
5 Alex Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture: The Impact of Classical Antiquity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990); Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (New York: Overlook Press, 2003).
6 Bob Phillips, The 1948 Olympics: How London Rescued the Games (Cheltenham: Sportsbooks, 2007), 1, 7–9.
7 Janie Hampton, The Austerity Olympics: When the Games Came to London in 1948 (London: Aurum Press, 2008), 65–70, 138, 146. The year before Hampton, sportswriter Bob Phillips released his general-audience book on the 1948 Olympics (cited above), but his primary interest lies in recounting the sporting results of the Games.
8 Daphné Bolz, ‘Welcoming the World’s Best Athletes: An Olympic Challenge for Post-war Britain’, International Journal of the History of Sport 27, no. 6 (2010); Richard Haynes, ‘The BBC, Austerity, and Broadcasting the 1948 Olympic Games’, International Journal of the History of Sport 27, no. 6 (2010).
9 The total cost of the 1936 Olympics was almost twice that of its immediate predecessor, Los Angeles 1932. Mike Milford, ‘The “Reel” Jesse Owens: Visual Rhetoric and the Berlin Olympics’, Sport in History 38, no. 1 (2018): 99.
10 Arnd Krüger, ‘Germany: The Propaganda Machine’, in The Nazi Olympics: Sport, Politics, and Appeasement in the 1930s, ed. Arnd Krüger and William Murray (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 22. Darren M. O’Byrne and Christopher Young offer a detailed analysis of Nazi financial bureaucracy that reveals the funding of the 1936 Olympics to be more convoluted than Krüger suggests. Nevertheless, what remains uncontroversial is the fact that the sheer economic scale of the 1936 Olympics dwarfed that of its predecessors. ‘The Will of the Führer? Financing Construction for the 1936 Olympics’, Journal of Contemporary History 57, no. 1 (2022): 27.
11 Kevin Jefferys, The British Olympic Association: A History (London: Palgrave Pivot, 2014), 67–9. Jefferys notes, however, that the British government – especially through the efforts of Philip Noel-Baker – proved essential in ‘providing important practical support’, such as ‘the housing of competitors in military bases’ and ‘concessions over rationing restrictions for athletes and overseas visitors’.
12 Peter J. Beck, ‘The British Government and the Olympic Movement: The 1948 London Olympics’, International Journal of the History of Sport 25, no. 5: 630–3. Technically, what prevented Germany from participating in 1948 was that the country had no National Olympic Committee at the time, as the bureaucratic apparatus of German sport had been dissolved by the Allies.
13 Raymond Glendenning, quoted in Haynes, ‘Broadcasting the 1948 Olympic Games’, 1031.
14 David Astor, ‘Comment’, The Observer, August 8, 1948, 4; Carl Wootton, quoted in Hampton, The Austerity Olympics, 167.
15 Hereafter The Glory of Sport, so as not to confuse the film with that Olympic year (or even that entire Olympiad!) more broadly.
16 Leo Enticknap, ‘The Non-Fiction Film in Post-War Britain’, (PhD dissertation, University of Exeter), 182–92.
17 Dikaia Chatziefstathiou and Ian Henry, ‘Hellenism and Olympism: Pierre de Coubertin and the Greek Challenge to the Early Olympic Movement’, Sport in History 27, no. 1 (March 2007): 39–40; Lamartine DaCosta, ‘A Never-Ending Story: The Philosophical Controversy over Olympism’, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport (2006): 160.
18 And the 1936 Games were certainly not lacking in spectacles. Carl Diem, chief organiser of the Berlin Olympics, conceived of the Games as a totalising masterpiece, something akin to a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Accordingly, the massive Reichssportsfeld was purpose-built for the Games in the westernmost portion of Berlin; this complex consisted of not only the neoclassical Olympic Stadium, but also a monumental entrance gate, a field for mass demonstrations, a temple honouring the German war dead of the Battle of Langemarck, and an open-air theatre in the ancient Greek style. These buildings were complemented by the Olympic Village, a planned community inspired by a concept first developed at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, but greatly expanded in Berlin with numerous practice facilities, tree-lined pathways, and an artificial lake. See Christopher Young, ‘“In Praise of Jesse Owens”: Technical Beauty at the Berlin Olympics 1936’, Sport In History 28, no. 1 (2008): 97; Nadine Rossol, ‘Performing the Nation: Sports, Spectacles, and Aesthetics in Germany, 1926–1936’, Central European History 43 (2010): 635–6; Molly Wilkinson Johnson, ‘The Legacies of 1936: Hitler’s Olympic Grounds and Berlin’s Bid to Host the 2000 Olympic Games’, German History 40, no. 2 (2022): 265; Emanuel Hübner, ‘The Olympic Village of 1936: Insights into the Planning and Construction Process’, International Journal of the History of Sport 31, no. 12 (2014): 1449–51.
19 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1; Nigel Spivey, The Ancient Olympics, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 236.
20 Nigel B. Crowther, ‘Studies in Greek Athletics, Part II’, Classical World 79, no. 2 (November–December 1985): 76–7. The evidence of this practice comes not from Olympia but primarily from Athens and, to a much lesser extent, Corinth.
21 Emmanuel Hübner, ‘Some Notes on the Preparations for the Olympic Games of 1926 and 1940: An Unknown Chapter in German-Finnish Cooperation’, International Journal of the History of Sport 30, no. 9 (2014): 955. Amsterdam 1928 and Los Angeles 1932 had also featured an Olympic flame burning in the stadium, but without the relay component and with no insinuation that the flame came from ancient Olympia. Rusty Wilson, Review of Onward to the Olympics: Historical Perspectives on the Olympic Games, by Gerald P. Schaus and Stephen R. Wenn, Journal of Sport History 35, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 361.
22 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: Avon Books, 1970), 70.
23 Erika Fischer-Lichte, ‘Resurrecting Ancient Greece in Nazi Germany: The Oresteia as Part of the Olympic Games in 1936’, in Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin, ed. Martin Revermann and Peter Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 482–3. For an account of Curtius’ excavations within the context of nineteenth-century German philhellenism, see also Suzanne L. Marchand, Down From Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 77–91.
24 Yiannis Moutsis, ‘Germany Meets Olympia: Archaeology and Olympism’, in The International Olympic Academy: A History of an Olympic Institution, 2nd edition, ed. Christina Koulouri and Konstantinos Georgiadis (Athens: International Olympic Academy, 2011), 123.
25 Theodor Lewald, quoted in Organisationskomitee für die XI. Olympiade Berlin 1936, The XIth Olympic Games Berlin, 1936, Official Report, Volume 1 (Berlin: Wilhelm Limpert-Verlag, 1937), 562. Lewald, a leading German sportsman and civil servant, was one of the strongest proponents of the Olympic movement in Germany, and in 1933, he helped to convince Hitler – who was initially opposed to the idea of hosting the Olympics – that the Games would be an excellent opportunity for a propaganda coup. However, Lewald’s role in the staging of the Games became more limited after it was discovered that his paternal grandmother had been born Jewish before converting to Christianity as a teenager. David Clay Large, ‘Hitler’s Games: Race Relations in the 1936 Olympics’, German Historical Institute London Bulletin 29, no. 1 (May 2007): 8; Mandell, The Nazi Olympics 61–2.
26 Marchand, Down from Olympus, 351.
27 Elizabeth Otto, ‘Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi Neoclassicism’, in A Modernist Cinema: Film Art from 1914 to 1941, ed. Scott W. Klein and Michael Valdez Moses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 270.
28 Ellen J. Lippman and Paula A. Wilson, ‘The Culpability of Accounting in Perpetuating the Holocaust’, Accounting History 12, no. 3 (2007): 286. In a 2012 monograph on Krupp, Harold James offers a partial exoneration of the firm as ‘a participant in a massive web of ideologically driven immortality’ rather than ‘a driving force behind the high-level making of Nazi policy’. Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 225. (It should also be noted, however, that reviewer Aleksander Bogdashkin praises James’ study overall but criticises the way that it provides ‘a rather idealized image of the Krupp dynasty’, especially in sanitising its role in the Second World War. Review of Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm, by Harold James, European History Quarterly 46, no. 1 [2016]: 146.)
29 Mackenzie, ‘From Athens to Berlin’, 317.
30 David Clay Large and Joshua J. H. Large, ‘The Berlin Olympics, 1936’, in Routledge Handbook of Sport and Politics, ed. Alan Bairner, John Kelly, and Jung Woo Lee (New York: Routledge, 2016), 423.
31 Janet Cahill, ‘Political Influence and the Olympic Flame’, Journal of Olympic History 7, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 29.
32 Karl Lennartz, ‘Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Schilgen, the First ‘Last’ Torch Runner’, Journal of Olympic History 13, no. 3 (November 2007): 70.
33 Mackenzie, ‘From Athens to Berlin’, 326–7.
34 Taylor Downing, Olympia, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 113.
35 For a broad-brushstrokes synopsis of these issues, see Arkadiusz Włodarczyk, ‘Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl – Propaganda, Document, or Art?’ Studies in Sports Humanities 19 (2016): 37–41.
36 Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, New York Review of Books, February 6, 1975, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/.
37 David B. Hinton, The Films of Leni Riefenstahl, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000), 60.
38 Lutz Koepnick, ‘0–1: Riefenstahl and the Beauty of Soccer’, in Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism, ed. Neil Christian Pages, Mary Rhiel, and Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey (Continuum: New York, 2008), 67–8.
39 See, e.g., Srđan Radaković, ‘Another Footnote to the History of Riefenstahl’s Olympia’, Film History: An International Journal 32, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 100–20.
40 Downing, Olympia, 16–17.
41 Mackenzie, ‘From Athens to Berlin’, 319.
42 At the same time that Riefenstahl was editing her film, Hitler was negotiating for the purchase of this copy of the Discobolus from Italy. He succeeded in 1938, the year Olympia was released, and no time was wasted in putting the new acquisition on proud display in the Munich Glyptothek. See Athena S. Leoussi, ‘Myths of Ancestry’, Nations and Nationalism 7, no. 4 (2001): 481; Michael Squire, The Art of the Body: Antiquity and Its Legacy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 22–3.
43 Daniel Wildmann, ‘Desired Bodies: Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, Aryan Masculinity and the Classical Body’, in Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, ed. Helen Roche and Kyriakos N. Demetriou (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 67.
44 Downing, Olympia, 70–3.
45 Downing, Olympia, 73.
46 Otto, ‘Nazi Neoclassicism’, 270–1.
47 The sequence described over the course of these last two paragraphs is from Leni Riefenstahl, dir., Olympia (Berlin: Olympia-Film, 1938), 1:00–21:55 (Part I), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3LOPhRq3Es.
48 Graham McFee and Alan Tomlinson, ‘Riefenstahl’s Olympia: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Shaping of the Aryan Athletic Body’, International Journal of the History of Sport 16, no. 2: 91.
49 This idea of Olympia as resurrection is borrowed and slightly adapted from Fischer-Lichte, ‘Resurrecting Ancient Greece’, 484.
50 H. S. Versnel, Coping with the Gods: Wayward Readings in Greek Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 34. Hugh Lloyd-Jones indirectly reports Wilamowitz’s remark as being more along the lines of, ‘To make the ancients speak to us we must feed them, like Odysseus in the underworld, upon blood, and that it is our own blood that we must give them’. This connection to Odysseus’ nekyia ritual in Odyssey XI fits particularly well within the context of Olympia and the torch ceremony, in that it underscores the explicitly ritualised nature of this communing with antiquity. Incidentally, Lloyd-Jones goes on to opine that ‘a scholar who [follows Wilamowitz’s advice] runs the risk of fathering upon the ancients beliefs and attitudes rooted wholly in the modern world’ – which sounds rather similar to the approach of Olympia and the broader pageantry of Berlin 1936. Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Duckworth, 1982), 200.
51 Leni Riefenstahl, Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 171.
52 Mackenzie, ‘From Athens to Berlin’, 319.
53 Mackenzie, ‘From Athens to Berlin’, 319.
54 Especially ingenious in this place-name sequence is the pivotal position of Athens – a dualistic city, simultaneously ancient and modern. In a way, the directional shift when the relay’s route reaches Athens might serve as another ‘lynchpin’ in this prologue: a shift from the eastward tour of ancient Greek cities (Olympia to Athens) to the northward march to the modern metropolis (Athens to Berlin).
55 Organising Committee for the XIV Olympiad, The Official Report of the Organising Committee for the XIV Olympiad (London: 1948), 22.
56 Organising Committee, Official Report, 209.
57 The HMS Liverpool shipped torches and other supplies to Greece in preparation for the relay, the HMS Whitesand Bay transported the flame from Corfu to Bari, and the HMS Bicester took the flame on its cross-Channel journey from Calais to Dover. Additionally, a Greek warship participated in the relay, transporting the flame from the coastal town of Katakolo to the island of Corfu. Organising Committee, Official Report, 210.
58 Mark Golden, ‘War and Peace in the Ancient and Modern Olympics’, Greece & Rome 58, no. 1 (2011): 7. In this view of the ekecheiria, Golden affirms what had been previously established by Manfred Lämmer, ‘Der sogenannte olympische Friede in der griechischen Antike’, Stadion 8/9 (1982–83): 47–83.
59 Donald G. Kyle, Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World, 2nd ed. (Newark: Wiley, 2014), 112.
60 Jacques A. Bromberg, ‘Sport and Peace: Panhellenic Myth-Making and the Modern Olympics’, in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Ancient Rhetoric, ed. Sophia Papaioannou, Andreas Serafim, and Michael Edwards (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 356.
61 J. Bollansée, ‘Aristotle and Hermippos of Smyrna on the Foundation of the Olympic Games and the Institution of the Sacred Truce’, Mnemosyne 52, no. 5 (October 1999): 563.
62 Spivey, The Ancient Olympics, 78.
63 Bromberg, ‘Sport and Peace’, 356.
64 Bromberg, ‘Sport and Peace’, 369–71.
65 Organising Committee, Official Report, 217.
66 Organisationskomitee, Official Report, Volume 1, 518.
67 Organising Committee, Official Report, 209.
68 In a sense, the return of ‘fair play’ at the first post-war Olympics mirrored the concurrent development of new international organisations and systems such as the United Nations and the Bretton Woods Agreement – the latter of which was explicitly described by a contemporary economist as ‘impos[ing] on members fair play in International [sic] dealings’ (Ernest H. Stern, ‘The Agreements of Bretton Woods’, Economica 11, no. 44 [1944], 176). Of course, as with the ideal of ‘fair play’ itself (see, e.g., Johnathan Duke-Evans, An English Tradition? The History and Significance of Fair Play [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023]), it is debatable to what extent this internationalist turn was meant to actually create a level playing field, as opposed to providing a moral pretext for strong nations to consolidate and spread their influence.
69 Hugh Traven, ‘Was Speed Enough?’ Manchester Evening News, September 11, 1948, 2.
70 Alan Dent, ‘Of Sport and Colour’, Illustrated London News, September 18, 1948, 334.
71 ‘Film of XIV Olympiad’, The Times, September 2, 1948, 6.
72 Castleton Knight, dir., XIVth Olympiad: The Glory of Sport (London: Rank Organisation/Olympic Games Film Company, 1948), 3:05–4:00, https://olympics.com/en/original-series/episode/st-moritz-london-1948-official-film-xivth-olympiad-the-glory-of-sport.
73 Mackenzie, ‘From Athens to Berlin’, 319.
74 Knight, The Glory of Sport, 5:25–5:30.
75 For detailed descriptions of this poster and its genesis, see Ian Jenkins, ‘Patriotic Hellenism: A Poster for the 1948 London Olympics’, Print Quarterly 28, no. 4 (December 2011): 451–5; Margaret Timmers, A Century of Olympic Posters, 2nd ed. (London: V&A Publishing, 2012), 54–6.
76 Mike O’Mahony, Olympic Visions: Images of the Games through History (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 135. O’Mahony identifies a twofold significance in this poster’s use of the Townley Discobolus: first, that it is in the collection of the British Museum, repudiating Hitler’s attempt to claim ownership of this classical composition by purchasing the Lancellotti copy; and second, that its head is cast downward, which adds a sense of quiet solemnity to the poster. For more on the head positioning of the Townley Discobolus (the result of an inaccurate restoration), see Viccy Coltman’s thoughts on the eighteenth-century discussion about the statue’s head, as well as the corresponding modern-day debate about whether to consider Townley’s copy as enmeshed within a broader ‘tradition of fakery’ in art. ‘Representation, Replication and Collecting in Charles Townley’s Late Eighteenth-Century Library’, Art History 29, no. 2: 321–2.
77 O’Mahony, ‘In the Shadow of Myron: The Impact of the Discobolus on Representations of Olympic Sport from Victorian Britain to Contemporary China’, International Journal of the History of Sport 30, no. 7 (2012): 18.
78 Knight, The Glory of Sport, 46:20–46:45.
79 Bill Collins, quoted in David Thurlow, ‘Blond God and the Olympic Torch’, Journal of Olympic History 14, no. 2 (August 2006): 45. Collins, who organised the relay, also declared that ‘a bald head or white hair will be disqualification’ for any of the intermediate-stage torchbearers in England.
80 David Thurlow, ‘Who Was John Mark?’ Journal of Olympic History 9, no. 3 (September 2001): 27. As Janie Hampton notes, many felt that the final torchbearer should have been Sydney Wooderson, Britain’s much-respected, and recently retired, middle-distance runner. Hampton’s belief is that the choice of the unknown Mark over the legendary Wooderson came down to Wooderson’s appearance – ’bald, bespectacled, with Brylcreemed hair and skinny white legs’ – not fitting the Olympic bill (Hampton, The Austerity Olympics, 95).
81 Ronald Camp, ‘The Flame Burns Here: Olympics Peace Call Goes out on Wings’, News Chronicle, July 30, 1948, 1; ‘22, He Bore the Olympic Torch before 85,000 People’, Daily Mirror, July 30, 1948, 1.
82 While blondness might not come to mind as a particularly ‘Greek’ phenotypical trait, Kostas Vlassopoulos has observed that heroes in ancient Greek literature were often described as having blond hair. ‘Athenian Slave Names and Athenian Social History’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, bd. 175, (2010): 123.
83 The ship docked on the evening of 21 June, but the passengers did not disembark until the next morning. 22 June has become the date most associated with the Windrush arrival, and is now commemorated in Britain as the official national holiday of Windrush Day. John Price, ‘Mapping Windrush Arrivals’, Livingmaps Review 9 (2020): 1; Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, ‘Press Release: Annual Day of Celebrations for the Windrush Generation’, 18 June 2018, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/annual-day-of-celebrations-for-the-windrush-generation.
84 Matthew Mead, ‘Empire Windrush: The Cultural Memory of an Imaginary Arrival’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45, no. 2 (2009): 142–4.
85 Mead, ‘Empire Windrush’, 145.
86 Technically, the British Nationality Act was passed on 30 July 1948 (and came into effect on 1 January 1949), postdating the arrival of the Windrush. Randall Hansen, ‘The Politics of Citizenship in 1940s Britain: The British Nationality Act’, Twentieth Century British History 10, no. 1 (1999): 86.
87 Huon Wardle and Laura Obermuller, ‘“Windrush Generation” and “Hostile Environment”: Symbols and Lived Experiences in Caribbean Migration to the UK’, Migration and Society 2 (2019): 81; Shelene Gomes and Arthur Torrington, ‘The Windrush Generation and British Citizenship Policy’, in Immigrant Lives: Intersectionality, Transnationality, and Global Perspectives, ed. Edward Shizha and Edward Makwarimba (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 180–181. The term ‘Windrush generation’ was coined in 1996 by Sam B. King and Arthur Torrington of the Windrush Foundation.
88 Thurlow, ‘Blond God’, 44.
89 And the legacy of these two competing ideas of British nationalism endures to the present day, as shown by the 2018 ‘Windrush scandal’ stemming from the 2012 ‘hostile environment’ illegal immigration policy of then – Home Secretary Theresa May. See, e.g., Wardle and Obermuller, ‘“Windrush Generation” and “Hostile Environment”’; Guy Hewitt, ‘The Windrush Scandal: An Insider’s Reflection’, Caribbean Quarterly: A Journal of Caribbean Culture 66, no. 1: 108–28; Mike Slaven, ‘The Windrush Scandal and the Individualization of Postcolonial Immigration Control in Britain’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 45, no. 16 (2022): 49–71; Irene Gedalof, ‘In the Wake of the Hostile Environment: Migration, Reproduction and the Windrush Scandal’, Feminist Theory 23, no. 4 (2022): 539–55.
90 Knight, The Glory of Sport, 38:40–39:15. This same narration is also heard, over a wide shot of people standing in a V formation in an Alpine snowbank, at the start of the St. Moritz section, but it is not accompanied by any torchbearing imagery (6:15–6:30).
91 Jessica Paga and Margaret M. Miles, ‘The Archaic Temple of Poseidon at Sounion’, Hesperia 85, no. 4 (October–December 2016): 689.
92 Andrew Lambert, Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires, and the Conflict that Made the Modern World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 2.
93 Organising Committee, Official Report, 210.
94 Winston Churchill, ‘Sinews of Peace’, 5 March 1946, National Archives, transcript, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/cold-war-on-file/iron-curtain-speech/.
95 See, e.g., David H. Close, The Origins of the Greek Civil War (London: Routledge, 1995); Spyridon Plakoudas, The Greek Civil War: Strategy, Counterinsurgency, and the Monarchy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017).
96 John O. Iatrides and Nicholas X. Rizopoulos, ‘The International Dimension of the Greek Civil War’, World Policy Journal 17, no. 1 (2000): 98. See also John Sakkas, Britain and the Greek Civil War, 1944–1949: British Imperialism, Public Opinion, and the Coming of the Cold War (Mainz: Rutzen, 2013).
97 That said, the victory was not total. The original plan for the torch relay was for the flame to pass through Athens, but safety concerns due to the ongoing war meant that the flame had to take a more direct route out of Greece – an indication of the geopolitical precarity of the city Churchill had singled out in his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech. Organising Committee, Official Report, 217.
98 Organisationskomitee, Official Report, Volume 1, 562–3.
99 Riefenstahl, Olympia, 2:02:00–2:03:20 (Part I).
100 See, e.g., Kruger, ‘The Propaganda Machine’, 24–5; Jules Boykoff, The 1936 Berlin Olympics: Race, Power, and Sportswashing (Champaign: Common Ground Research Networks, 2023), 61–2.
101 Organisationskomitee, Official Report, Volume 1, 6.
102 Carolyn Marvin, ‘Avery Brundage and American Participation in the 1936 Olympic Games’, Journal of American Studies 16, no. 1 (April 1982): 97–9. Marvin describes how in 1936 Brundage ignored a letter (written in English) from a German social-democratic resistance group detailing the extent of Nazi Olympic propaganda.
103 Kenneth Burke, ‘The Rhetoric of Hitler’s “Battle”’, in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), 171.
104 Brooke Holmes, ‘Liquid Antiquity’, in Liquid Antiquity, ed. Brooke Holmes and Karen Marta (Athens: DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, 2017), 31.
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Justin Muchnick
Justin Muchnick is a PhD student at the Institute of Classical Studies.