As nearly 30 million viewers tuned in for the waterborne opening ceremony at this summer’s Paris Olympics, it’s safe to bet that most were not thinking of Adolf Hitler.
Malcolm Gladwell isn’t most people.
Gladwell, the author, journalist and podcaster, explores the 1936 Berlin Olympics on the latest season of his podcast series “Revisionist History.” Gladwell and co-host Ben Naddaff-Hafrey examine the complex cast of characters and political developments that led to Nazi Germany hosting the Summer Olympics, and what led countries across the world to participate.
The nine-episode season, titled “Hitler’s Olympics,” introduces listeners to a handful of main characters who played critical roles in the leadup to the Berlin Games, and also shines a light on US track legend Jesse Owens. It scrutinizes the friendship Owens famously shared with German long-jumper Luz Long — a story that the podcast suggests is largely a myth.
More broadly, the Berlin Games, Gladwell and Naddaff-Hafrey contend, would not only leave generations of sports fans with lasting visuals — such as Owens on the podium with Long, who is giving a Nazi salute — but would prove to reshape the Olympics themselves.
In a conversation with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Gladwell also made the claim that the conversations that preceded the Berlin Olympics — including debates over boycotts and the inclusion of Jewish athletes — echo contemporary conversations about the participation and safety of Israeli Olympians, whose involvement in the Paris Games led to death threats and calls for disqualification. (Both Gladwell and Naddaff-Hafrey have Jewish ancestry.)
To Gladwell, the inextricably political nature of the Olympics today is a legacy of the 1936 Games. And he argued that both then and now, it is unfair to pin the geopolitical issues of the day on athletes whose sole focus is their sport.
“If someone’s spending the last 10 years of their life training for the long jump, what do the foreign policy goals of the current Israeli administration have to do with that?” Gladwell said. “Nothing. It’s silly. It’s just as silly as it was in ’72 or ’68 or ’36.”
Read on for our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.
A lot of your work challenges people to look at a well-known topic in a new way — the “overlooked and misunderstood” moments in history. What about the 1936 Olympics did you feel was misunderstood? Why did you feel the need to either add to or correct the record on that?
It was surprising to me how robust the argument was at the time about whether we should be going to Berlin. I’m not a historian of the period. I had naively assumed that the worries about Hitler were fairly muted in the early 1930s and it didn’t really pick up steam until ’38 or ’39. But I was surprised to learn that a huge portion of the American population was already alert to what Hitler was up to in the mid ’30s, and that the public sentiment was equally divided about whether we should be going to the Berlin Games.
It makes the story of our reaction to the Holocaust even more heartbreaking and tragic, when you realize it wasn’t a case that we were unaware of Hitler and, “Oh, we found out in ’44 that bad things were happening.” No, no, in ’34 and ’33 and ’32 there were people coming back [from Germany] and saying, “This man is a complete lunatic, we should be careful about our dealings with him and to what extent we get wrapped up in the games he’s playing.”
In terms of the Paris Games, I’m curious what parallels you’ve seen between 1936 and now? Obviously there have been questions about security and the participation of Jewish athletes. But what resonated with you as you watched the Paris Olympics, having done this deep dive on 1936?
The obvious point is that the Games we have now are the Games that, in the broadest sense, Hitler and his people created. They were the ones who understood what a spectacle it was. We forget, in the teens and ’20s, the Olympics were basically a glorified track meet. It wasn’t this kind of international extravaganza the way it is now. It’s really Hitler who understands that the Games have this broader symbolic potential, and can boost the status of the host country. We’re still living in that world in a certain sense.
I don’t want to draw too much of a link between 1936 and 1972 — when 11 Israelis were murdered in the Olympic Village — but obviously in the Olympics, since 1972, the treatment of Israeli athletes has taken center stage, especially this year, as people were calling for boycotts and there were death threats against Israeli athletes in Paris. How did you think about that in the context of 1936?
The International Olympic Committee had a choice in ’36. One of the options on the table for them, as the controversy over Hitler grew in the mid ’30s, was to move the Games to a neutral site. And had they done that, they would have avoided generations of these controversies. If you move it to a neutral site, and you just say, “From now on, the whole country that you represent is irrelevant. We’re not playing any geopolitical games. You come here if you qualify, and everyone competes, and we’re leaving all politics at home.” That would have made sense. But the problem is they wanted to leave the politics out of it, even as they were continuing to host the Games in politically charged places.
You can’t hold Israeli athletes … you can’t make them into symbols of your feelings about the conflict in Gaza. That’s ridiculous. If someone’s spending the last 10 years of their life training for the long jump, what do the foreign policy goals of the current Israeli administration have to do with that? Nothing. It’s silly. It’s just as silly as it was in ’72 or ’68 or ’36.
One story that really stood out to me was Helene Mayer, the Jewish fencer who gives a Nazi salute. The story is that she was told that it would help save her family from the Nazis, which it ended up doing. I’m curious what struck you about her story. What did you think when you heard her story for the first time?
You can’t help but feel sorry for her on some level, right? When we hopelessly confuse sports and politics, this is what happens. We put athletes in impossible positions. It’s one thing to put people who have trained for being in the public eye on this stage, or have prepared themselves for it. They’re athletes. … Who knows what she knew about it? She was living in California, she was a fencer, who knows what she knew about Hitler’s Germany? It’s just ridiculous to put that weight on someone’s shoulders.
It struck me that none of the four main characters in the podcast is Jewish. How did you think about telling this story and elevating the role of Jewish identity and the experiences of Jews at that time in this story, given that those four key players were themselves not Jewish?
The world that we’re dealing with here, at the time, there’s so many doors closed to Jews. They’re not in positions of leadership in the IOC. It’s the ’30s, we’re dealing with a world where there’s a lot of discussion about Jews, but it’s not by Jews. That’s just a function of choosing to tell a story from the 1930s. And a reminder of the extent to which Jews were just excluded.
Lastly, this podcast is teaching people about the 1936 Games. But I’m curious what lessons you think people should take from the 1936 Games?
If we are going to go this route of having this exalted spectacle every four years where politics is sort of hopelessly mixed up with things … if you want to have political arguments or use them as opportunities to learn about the rest of the world, then let’s do that in good faith. Maybe what we should be saying is, if every four years the world suddenly cares about what athletes are doing, then let’s take that particular obligation, or that opportunity, seriously. Let’s have proper debates about the issues that are raised, as opposed to these kinds of unformed, haphazard debates.