"Olympic village - 1936"
Extracted from Berlin's series
On the first of August 1936, the XIth Olympic Games’ opening-ceremony was celebrated in Berlin. Musical fanfares directed by the famous composer Richard Strauss announced the dictator's arrival to the largely German crowd. Hundreds of athletes in opening day regalia marched into the stadium, team by team in alphabetical order. Inaugurating a new Olympic ritual, a lone runner arrived bearing a torch carried by relay from the site of the ancient Games in Olympia, Greece.
For two weeks in August 1936, the German dictatorship camouflaged its racist, militaristic character while hosting the Summer Olympics. Minimizing its antisemitic agenda and plans for territorial expansion, the regime exploited the Games to impress many foreign spectators and journalists with an image of a peaceful, tolerant but strong Germany. Having rejected a proposed boycott of the 1936 Olympics, the United States and other western democracies missed the opportunity to take a stand that contemporary observers claimed might have restrained Hitler and bolstered international resistance to Nazi tyranny.
The Olympic Village complex. The creation of a separate housing area for the great number of athletes attending the Olympic Games was first attempted in Los Angeles in 1932. Four years later, at the XIth Olympiad in Berlin, the concept was further developed with the construction of this tiny ‘village’, just 14 kilometers from the Olympic Stadium. The settlement was built with new cabins and cottages, giving the best of the modern confort and equipped with central heating and a modern kitchen facility to keep the athletes' calorie counts high. Newspapers in the U.S. ran kitschy photographs in their Olympic reports featuring American athletes gathered in front of their cabins and singing folk songs after long days spent breaking world records.
By hosting the XIth Olympic Games, the Nazi regime collected the benefits of this huge propaganda success: shaping the Nazi image for Germans and for the world, before accelerating the expansionism of the Reich, the persecution of Jews and other "enemies of the state", culminating in World War II and the Holocaust.
French-born photographer Didier Gaillard-Hohlweg is known for his singular vision of landscapes. Dealing with the notion of oblivion and collective amnesia, he travels around the world, records, redefines landscapes in a unique way. In 2008-2009, he stayed several times in Berlin - Germany, in order to perform researches on his project from which this series are extracted. In a ‘documentary’ style, the remaining pictures depict the actual state of the village, after having been converted to an infantry training facility for the German troops of wermacht and transformed into a soviet army casern for more than 40 years until Re-unification.
On the trail of history. Isolated pasted colors houses and ruined rooms give to the village an unconfortable feeling, as if it was haunted. Playing the game of amnesia, these neutral pictures of the Olympic Village also force the viewer to imagine a story connected to sport and this historical context.
These series of photographs are intended to be a cultural tool, providing an illustrative framework for any future informative exhibition, specifically applying to the duty to remember the rise of Nazi dictatorship and tyranny.
