The Olympic flame: the Nazis' torch burns on

A timely reminder that the Olympic torch was invented for the 1936 Berlin Olympics -- and that the controversy it is currently attracting as it makes its way to Beijing derives directly from its origins as a talisman of nationalistic supercessionism.

Now, despite China's attempt to put a smiley face on the torch relay -- "Light the Passion, Share the Dream" says the Chinese Web site (see torchrelay.beijing2008.cn/en) -- the Tibetan protests have laid bare its nationalist essence. There are reasons why the Chinese wanted a route that invoked glory (by touching Everest's peak) and power (by passing through Taiwan).

Of course in 1936 the relay reflected a more ominous threat. The torch was carried through Salonika, Greece; Sofia, Bulgaria; Belgrade, Yugoslavia; Budapest; and Vienna, and was welcomed along the way not by extensive protests but with pro-Nazi demonstrations. A prescient editorial in The New York Times, sensing the drumbeats of war, called the torch's route a "strategic highway" that traced the line of the German "Drang Nach Osten" -- the drive to the East that the Kaiser sought in the First World War, and which Hitler was soon to put into practice.

The article notes and links to the upcoming exhibition at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936, which opens on the 25th.

Posted by David on April 15, 2008 10:06 AM