You don’t expect to see security guards roaming the foyer of the Hannover State Opera, a well-regarded, midsize opera house in a midsize central Germany city.
But before the Saturday premiere of “Echo 72: Israel in Munich,” a new opera about the attack on Israeli athletes by Palestinian militants at the 1972 Munich Olympics, at least four guards tried to blend into the crowd, surveying audience members as they arrived.
“The biggest challenge is fear, and the fear is everywhere,” said Laura Berman, the Hannover State Opera’s artistic director. “The fear is in all the people who participate in the project.”
While “Echo 72” was first envisioned in 2021, its premiere came at a time when tensions over the war in Gaza are running high in Germany’s culture scene. After Hamas’s brutal assault on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s deadly retaliation in Gaza, many artists here who had criticized Israel had shows canceled, prizes suspended and talks called off.
The challenge of making art in such a polarized society “is enormous,” Berman said. Recently, the debate has become so shrill that exhibitions and performances only loosely related to the Middle East have been hit with protests.
In this charged atmosphere, the new opera and the movie “September 5” — which dramatizes the same events and came out in German movie theaters this month — are challenging how Germany remembers its history, at a time when the overlap between that story and Israel’s is especially fraught.
At the heart of both is the paradox of the 1972 Munich Olympics. With World War II and Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics still in relatively recent memory at the time, Germany wanted to hit reset and present itself to the world as a reformed country. Instead, a violent attack against Israeli Jews on German soil was broadcast around the world.
On Sept. 5, 1972, Palestinian militants from the Black September group broke into the Olympic Village, killed two Israeli athletes and took nine others hostage in the hopes that they could force the release of Palestinian prisoners and left-wing extremists from Israeli and German jails. A botched attempt by the German police to release the hostages ended in a shootout that led to the death of the nine athletes and a police officer.
Germany is still grappling with its responsibility. In 2022, as part of 50th anniversary commemorations, the country officially apologized for the authorities’ failures and agreed to further compensate the victims’ families and investigate the attack.
The anniversary observances also inspired artists to turn their attention to the incident and its implications for Germany’s memory culture, the institutional efforts to face the country’s Nazi past.
From officialdom to culture, “the 50th anniversary of the Munich massacre started a much more intense remembrance,” said Roman Deininger, a reporter at the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper who coauthored a book about the attack.
Even though the composer Michael Wertmüller and the librettist Roland Schimmelpfennig began working on “Echo 72” years before the most recent Israel-Hamas war broke out, and “September 5” was already shot and edited by then, the deadly developments in the Middle East have cast these productions in a new light.
In anticipation that “Echo 72” would be viewed in this context, the Hannover State Opera decided to accompany the performance with a lecture series to give viewers the historical background, with readings, film screenings and a talk called “Why Terrorism?,” which explores the origins of terrorism.
But the opera’s staging avoids the current conflict “like a hot potato,” said Lydia Steier, its director.
On an austere stage and with an eerie, atonal score, there are no characters who directly embody the Israeli athletes who died in the attack. Instead, singers dressed in black-and-white outfits represent Olympic sports, rather than national teams, and sing about their disciplines in abstract, coded ways.
The villain in the opera is not the Palestinian militants, who are also not directly shown, but a choir of onlookers that Steier said were a “fun house mirror” of the audience. Sometimes those singers dress like modern-day tourists, with fanny packs and selfie-sticks; other times, their outfits resemble the German public during the Nazi-era.
In an interview before the premiere, Steier said she expected that some audience members would be scrutinizing “Echo 72” for evidence of bias toward Israel or the Palestinians. But instead of calling to mind the current Middle East conflict, Steier hoped that people would reflect on Germany’s memory culture. “Ideally, those exact audience members would leave being like, maybe I’m part of the problem,” she said.
In one of the opera’s most intense scenes, the choir greedily gloats as the sports characters writhe in glass display cases, covered in fake blood. Steier said she wanted to challenge the audience to recognize that “the observation of brutality as a form of entertainment is one thing that, no matter when, how or where, we just can’t seem to shake.”
“September 5” similarly deals with the ethical dilemmas inherent in making a spectacle out of tragedy.
Set entirely in ABC’s Munich Olympics studio, the movie begins with an ad that shows off the station’s first-of-its-kind live broadcast from the event. When gunshots are heard outside, a fast-paced newsroom drama kicks off. Sports reporters find themselves covering a hostage crisis, and are quickly confronted with editorial questions still relevant today. What to call the attackers? Should a killing be shown on live TV? The movie doesn’t have an answer.
The dilemmas “September 5” raises have clear resonance with Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s destructive bombing campaign in Gaza, scenes of which were widely shared on social media in real time. But that was not the director’s intent. Tim Fehlbaum, who helmed the movie, began researching it in 2020, he said. He wanted to draw a contemporary audience back to the first time “we had a live camera pointed at the tragedy,” he added.
While some German movie reviews noted the relevance of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack for viewers today, Fehlbaum was loath to talk events in the Middle East. “For us it is clear that this movie is more about the media,” he said, adding that it was also an exploration of how the events fit into Germany’s memory culture.
At the beginning of the film a German translator played by Leonie Benesch, expresses hope that the Olympics will give Germany an opportunity to move on from its past. By the end of the movie, that hope is dashed. “Germany failed,” she says.
Alfred Anton Fliegerbauer, 56, the son of the German police officer killed during the 1972 attack, said in an interview after the “Echo 72” premiere that he was glad that both the opera and the movie were reminding people of the events that led to his father’s death when he was just four years old. But, he said, he hoped people would also be inspired to turn the memory of the tragedy into something good.
Sitting in the Hannover opera house, Fliegerbauer pulled out a business card for a children’s foundation he recently established in his father’s honor to support intercultural reconciliation, civil engagement and trauma recovery.
“It is cool that this is staged, amplified, remembered, mourned and thought about,” Fliegerbauer said about “Echo 72” and “September 5.” “But it’s much more important that something new and positive arises.”
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