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You don\u2019t expect to see security guards roaming the foyer of the Hannover State Opera, a well-regarded, midsize opera house in a midsize central German city.<\/p>\n
But before the Saturday premiere of \u201cEcho 72: Israel in Munich<\/a>,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe biggest challenge is fear, and the fear is everywhere,\u201d said Laura Berman, the Hannover State Opera\u2019s artistic director. \u201cThe fear is in all the people who participate in the project.\u201d<\/p>\n While \u201cEcho 72\u201d was first envisioned in 2021, its premiere came at a time when tensions over the war in Gaza are running high in Germany\u2019s culture scene<\/a>. After Hamas\u2019s brutal assault on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel\u2019s deadly retaliation in Gaza, many artists here who had criticized Israel had shows canceled, prizes suspended and talks called off<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The challenge of making art in such a polarized society \u201cis enormous,\u201d Berman said. Recently, the debate has become so shrill that exhibitions<\/a> and performances<\/a> only loosely related to the Middle East have been hit with protests.<\/p>\n In this charged atmosphere, the new opera and the movie \u201cSeptember 5<\/a>\u201d \u2014 which dramatizes the same events and came out in German movie theaters this month \u2014 are challenging how Germany remembers its history, at a time when the overlap between that story and Israel\u2019s is especially fraught.<\/p>\n At the heart of both is the paradox of the 1972 Munich Olympics. With World War II and Hitler\u2019s 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<\/a> against Israeli Jews on German soil was broadcast around the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Germany is still grappling with its responsibility. In 2022, as part of 50th anniversary commemorations, the country officially apologized<\/a> for the authorities\u2019 failures and agreed to further compensate the victims\u2019 families and investigate the attack.<\/p>\n The anniversary observances also inspired artists to turn their attention to the incident and its implications for Germany\u2019s memory culture, the institutional efforts to face the country\u2019s Nazi past.<\/p>\n From officialdom to culture, \u201cthe 50th anniversary of the Munich massacre started a much more intense remembrance,\u201d said Roman Deininger, a reporter at the Munich-based S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung newspaper who coauthored a book about the attack.<\/p>\n Even though the composer Michael Wertm\u00fcller and the librettist Roland Schimmelpfennig began working on \u201cEcho 72\u201d years before the most recent Israel-Hamas war broke out, and \u201cSeptember 5\u201d was already shot and edited by then, the deadly developments in the Middle East have cast these productions in a new light.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In anticipation that \u201cEcho 72\u201d would be viewed in this context, the Hannover State Opera decided to accompany the performance with a lecture series<\/a> to give viewers the historical background, with readings, film screenings and a talk called \u201cWhy Terrorism?,\u201d which explores the origins of terrorism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But the opera\u2019s staging avoids the current conflict \u201clike a hot potato,\u201d said Lydia Steier, its director.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cfun house mirror\u201d 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.<\/p>\n In an interview before the premiere, Steier said she expected that some audience members would be scrutinizing \u201cEcho 72\u201d 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\u2019s memory culture. \u201cIdeally, those exact audience members would leave being like, maybe I\u2019m part of the problem,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In one of the opera\u2019s 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 \u201cthe observation of brutality as a form of entertainment is one thing that, no matter when, how or where, we just can\u2019t seem to shake.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cSeptember 5\u201d similarly deals with the ethical dilemmas inherent in making a spectacle out of tragedy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Set entirely in ABC\u2019s Munich Olympics studio<\/a>, the movie begins with an ad that shows off the station\u2019s 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\u2019t have an answer.<\/p>\n The dilemmas \u201cSeptember 5\u201d raises have clear resonance with Hamas\u2019s Oct. 7 attack and Israel\u2019s destructive bombing campaign in Gaza, scenes of which were widely shared on social media in real time. But that was not the director\u2019s 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 \u201cwe had a live camera pointed at the tragedy,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n While some German movie reviews<\/a> noted the relevance of Hamas\u2019s Oct. 7 attack for viewers today, Fehlbaum was loath to talk events in the Middle East. \u201cFor us it is clear that this movie is more about the media,\u201d he said, adding that it was also an exploration of how the events fit into Germany\u2019s memory culture.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cGermany failed,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Alfred Anton Fliegerbauer, 56, the son of the German police officer killed during the 1972 attack, said in an interview after the \u201cEcho 72\u201d premiere that he was glad that both the opera and the movie were reminding people of the events that led to his father\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Sitting in the Hannover opera house, Fliegerbauer pulled out a business card for a children\u2019s foundation<\/a> he recently established in his father\u2019s honor to support intercultural reconciliation, civil engagement and trauma recovery.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is cool that this is staged, amplified, remembered, mourned and thought about,\u201d Fliegerbauer said about \u201cEcho 72\u201d and \u201cSeptember 5.\u201d \u201cBut it\u2019s much more important that something new and positive arises.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n