[Jon Stewart alluded to this the other night. Here's the fuller story. Lots of fun details, especially the burning underpants.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/arts/14conn.html
The New York Times
April 14, 2008
Connections
The Relay of Fire Ignited by the Nazis
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
If you want to know how the Olympic torch really began its "Journey of
Harmony," as the Chinese call its current relay, if you want to see why
the torch has had to pass through a human obstacle course composed of
protesters, SWAT teams and police in San Francisco, Paris and London,
then do not look to Tibet's grievances against China. Look to the
opening of Leni Riefenstahl's 1938 film, "Olympia."
In that homage to Berlin's 1936 Olympic Games the origins of this
ritual are revealed. Never before had a lighted torch been relayed from
a Greek temple in Olympia to an athletic competition, let alone by
thousands of runners trying to keep it from being extinguished.
So Riefenstahl creates the myth the Greeks never got around to telling,
creating a filmic counterpart to the opening of Wagner's "Ring," in
which an entire world gradually emerges from elemental fragments. The
camera begins by surveying a misty landscape of ruins, of shattered
pillars and overgrown grasses. Restless and circling, the camera
reveals a Greek temple standing amid the stones. Heads and the bodies
of Greek statues appear in an eerie erotic landscape. Under the
sensuous caresses of Riefenstahl's lens, a naked discus thrower comes
to life, polished stone becoming muscular flesh. Another athlete
prepares to throw a javelin, its trajectory leading toward a bowl of
fire. Lighting the Olympic torch, another nude acolyte triumphantly
raises it aloft like Wagner's Siegfried displaying his sword.
Humanity is given its purpose; the relay begins. The torch is conveyed
from one bearer to the next and ends in Berlin at a 110,000-seat
stadium where it ignites an altar of flame. Through shimmering heat the
sun itself can be seen, vibrating in sympathy. And Hitler salutes the
cheering crowds.
This passing of the torch thus demonstrates a lineage of inheritance --
a historical relay -- making Nazi Germany the living heir to Ancient
Greece. A claim was being staked.
This claim was not unrelated to the very existence of the Olympic
games. As Nigel Spivey shows in his book "The Ancient Olympics," many
different traditions, myths and cults fed the Greek games. But the
founding of the modern Olympics was far more straightforward. A German
scholar, J .J. Winckelmann (1717-1768) proposed excavating Olympia, the
ancient site of the Greek games; the honor was eventually left to a
19th-century German scholar, Ernst Curtius.
It was a Frenchman, however, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the
modern international Olympics with the first games in 1896, explicitly
declaring that the French should reconstitute what the Germans had
exhumed. The implied rivalry was more bloodily enacted in the
battlefield beginning in 1914, two years before Germany was supposed to
host the games for the first time.
Then, after its defeat, Germany was banned from the Olympics in 1920
and 1924. So hosting the games in Berlin in 1936 was a kind of
restitution, like the one the Nazis sought on a grander scale, undoing
the humiliating post-World War I penalties. (Germany had also just
remilitarized the Rhineland.) But Hitler wanted the torch fully in
German hands. He authorized a resumption of German excavations at
Olympia while an organizer of the 1936 games, Carl Diem, came up with
the idea of the relay.
"In 1940," Hitler told the Nazi architect Albert Speer, "the Olympic
Games will take place in Tokyo. But thereafter they will take place in
Germany for all time to come." Speer was to build a 400,000-seat
stadium in Nuremberg as the Olympics' permanent home. (An exhibition
about the 1936 games will open at the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum on April 25.)
The International Olympic Committee, of course, offers a slightly
different account of the torch relay. (See
multimedia.olympic.org/pdf/en_report_655.pdf.) The Olympic Museum in
Lausanne, Switzerland, explains that the torch alludes to the "positive
values that Man has always associated with fire," its relay
transmitting "a message of peace and friendship amongst peoples." But
the Olympics still preserves the self-loving aura of the Nazi myth.
White-robed priestesses in the ruined temple of Hera (all actresses of
course) light the torch using focused rays of the sun; backup flames
insure that the fire's lineage remains intact in case the main torch is
temporarily extinguished (as it was this year). "The purity of the
flame," the Olympics brochure piously explains, "is guaranteed by the
way it is lit using the sun's rays."
It was partly in opposition to such fetishistic reverence that in 1956,
as the torch made its way to the games in Melbourne, Australia, a
student interloper made a model out of a chair leg and a plum-pudding
can stuffed with a burning pair of underpants and solemnly presented
the flaming symbol to the mayor of Sydney.
But more recently the relay
has needed no help in attaining kitsch and stunt. In 1976 the flame was
used to send an electronic pulse by satellite from Athens to Ottawa,
where a programmed laser lighted a torch. In 1996 the passing of the
flame took place between two parachute jumpers. In 2000 a flaming torch
(presumably protected) was carried under water at the Great Barrier
Reef.
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.
Since then the torch's routes, like the games themselves, have
regularly been subject to disruption and conflict. The defense of the
Olympic enterprise is that the universal ideals of good sportsmanship
and fair-mindedness provide a means to transcend national difference.
But the history suggests that sentimentality is being slathered over
rituals and practice that proclaim something quite different.
The Greeks themselves were more forthright. They believed, Mr. Spivey
suggests, that "all games were war games." At a conference at Yale this
month about Greek "hoplite" warfare -- in which a wide array of Greek
citizenry supposedly maneuvered together in vast, linked phalanxes --
one hypothesis was that this reflected a revolutionary view of an
interconnected citizenry. In this light all war games also became
social games. At any rate all games were as serious as war, and none
were about the brotherhood of all mankind.
Perhaps, then, pretense should be eliminated. The Olympic Games should
simply acknowledge that they reflect wars fought by other means. Not a
pleasant thought, but perhaps closer to the truth than the perspective
of Avery Brundage, the fifth president of the International Olympic
Committee, who just after the 1936 Berlin games said they proved that
the Olympics are "the most effective influence towards international
peace and harmony yet devised."
Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936 runs from April 25 through Aug. 17 at the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington;
ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/olympics.