Review: Mandell, The Nazi Olympics (1971)

[truepenny]

The Nazi Olympics by Richard D. Mandell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a sardonic blow by blow account of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Mandell discusses both the Olympic Games and their modern "re-creation" and the ways in which the Nazis turned the Games into a celebration of the German volk. He is a cynical observer of the confluence of two ideologies that, in their different ways, require idealism to work, and he talks a lot about the way those two idealizing ideologies used each other to create the '36 Games. Enjoyable and thought-provoking.



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