Observer’s observation: Tim Fehlbaum’s award-winning film about the Olympic attack touches on questions of media and morality at the Venice Film Festival.
“Are those gunshots? Were those shots?” – actually, this is no longer a question, but rather an incredulous astonishment from the very first moment; the questioner, a Frenchman working for the US news channel, actually knows ABCalready know what the answer is.
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But it can’t be true – shots in the Olympic Village, here in Munich of all places, during the “cheerful games” that have so far painted such a perfect picture of a new Germany, a happy, persil-colored democratic country.
Crisis of the first order
It was the sports journalists from ABCwho found out very early, earlier than others, that something unusual was happening in the Olympic Village. They heard gunshots and they tried to get to the bottom of these gunshots.
The German film “September 5” – pronounced “September Five” – which recently had a celebrated premiere at the Venice Film Festival, is about the story of this team of sports reporters, who were suddenly placed in a completely different situation and in the middle of a major international crisis and made media history with the largest live broadcast ever made.
You wouldn’t believe it, but it is actually a German film, an excellent film. It comes from Germany and yet it doesn’t look like it does. That is definitely meant as a compliment.
Maybe it’s because director Tim Fehlbaum has a Swiss passport; he may have studied in Munich, but he has a different, cosmopolitan perspective. Tim Fehlbaum is de facto making an American film. Fehlbaum does it exactly the way it should be done.
Media and morality
He tells a story that, at first glance, seems to be evading the very beginning: Can and may one tell the story of this dramatic hostage-taking – which, after unbelievable repeated failures by the police forces and their political commanders, ended in a massacre and the murder of all Israeli hostages – may one tell it from the internal view of a single news editorial office and thus both narrowly perspectived and doubly entangled as the observation of the observers?
But it is important to remember that Tim Fehlbaum shows us what the world saw. Because it only saw the ABC pictures. The ABC studio was located relatively close to the Olympic Village and relatively close to Connollystrasse 31.
He addresses the moral questions that the media always ask themselves. Journalists need the ability to weigh things up and the ability to report when in doubt. This is also the ability and willingness of people to accept guilt, which is a part of life.
Is it okay to use words like “terrorism” and “guerrilla”?
There are many small, telling details here, and the constant breaking of everyday life into a state of emergency: Is it OK to use words like “terrorism” and “guerrilla”? What should we do when the live cameras capture images of people being shot?
And give your footage to the competition of CBS to prevent the station from claiming its space on the only (!!) satellite? They do, but only because a technician finds a trick to permanently insert “ABC” into the broadcast picture.
Fehlbaum shows us how these images and how television were made tactile: with analogue technology. Films, for example, always had to be developed first.
Munich 1972 was the first live broadcast terrorist attack. Up to 900 million people saw it.
German complicity and German arrogance
Here we are also witnessing German complicity, in the sense that the Germans were quite incorrigible, but did not want to acknowledge the dangers that existed and that they were completely overwhelmed by the situation.
The Israelis actually wanted to protect their own people, but the (arrogant?) Germans did not allow Israeli security forces to be in the Olympic Village. But even when the worst had already happened, there was another very wrong German behavior: the police realized pretty early on that they were not up to the task.
But they did not draw any conclusions from it. The Germans rejected the Israeli government’s offer to deploy Israeli special forces. The units were already on site that morning.
False arrogance and the fatal impression that everything is under control
“No wonder they lost the war.” This sarcastic sentence is said by one of the ABC-Reporter, as he watches the amateurish attempt of some German police officers, dressed in colorful tracksuits and equipped with inappropriate long weapons, to storm the apartment occupied by the hostage takers at Connollystrasse 31 – and then quickly abort this attempt.
At some point, the ABC team’s German translator, played by Leonie Benesch, in her own despair about their compatriots, explains them to the Americans as follows: “The Germans make one mistake after another, and yet try to give the impression that they have everything under control.”
This still applies today. It applies to the traffic light coalition as well as to all other parties, to business, culture and the media.
Finally, the embarrassing appearance of government spokesman Conrad Ahlers on television. Embarrassing, not because he fell for a false report, but because of the way he announced it: Even though Ahlers was a left-wing social democrat and Willy Brandt party supporter, he still speaks like a Nazi here: in his facial expression, his posture, his language – and in his smug vanity.
The German Fall from grace
This film is highly topical: It not only tells of how the Germans dealt with the genocide they committed, of their denial of guilt, their denial and relativization and then, of course, of the consequences that were drawn from it.
This film tells the story of how the Germans tried in 1972 to create a counter-model to the 1936 Olympics and to show that they had learned something, that they had left the guilt behind them, that they were now different Germans – that worked well for ten days. On the eleventh day of the games, September 5, this illusion collapsed in a brutal way. This film is shocking in a good way and takes you back emotionally to that moment on September 5, 1972.
Fehlbaum skillfully shows pictures of the Israelis’ visit to Dachau, shortly before the attack, 27 years after the war.
But this is also a very timely film because we, because since October 7, 2023, the free world has again been confronted with a terrorist attack by Arab terrorists on Israelis and Jews all over the world, and on a much larger scale. In 1972, there was the first time this kind of brutal, inhuman massacre, which could not be justified by the claim of a war of liberation.
That should never have happened. Munich 1972 was the original sin of our generation. After that, the Federal Republic was not what it was before.
This excellent film brings all this to mind.
