Kay Schiller and Christopher Young. The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany. (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2010. Pp. xiii, 348. Cloth $65.00, paper $24.95

In public memory, the 1972 Munich Olympics have become associated with the nadir of modern Olympic history: the hostage‐taking and murder of eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team by the radical Palestinian group Black September. This association was further cemented by Kevin MacDonald's high‐profile documentary One Day in September (1999) and, more recently, Steven Spielberg's film Munich (2005). Kay Schiller and Christopher Young discuss the terrorist attack in the final chapter of their book as part of an account of West Germany's shifting international relations and tensions with the Arab world and the state of Israel. The book refuses, however, to reduce the history of the 1972 Olympics to one tragedy and asks larger questions about the significance of the planning, preparation, and, to a lesser extent, aftermath of the games. It succeeds in developing an interlocking narrative...