Munich stirs up mixed feelings

MUNICH – In the rapid-fire opening scenes of Steven Spielberg’s new film “Munich,” we are instantly launched back to Sept. 5, 1972, that fateful day when all eyes turned toward the West German city and the horror that unfolded at the Olympic games there.

“The Munich Massacre,” as it would come to be called, began at 4 a.m., when a Palestinian terrorist group called Black September invaded the rooms of a group of Israeli athletes, murdering two of them and taking nine more hostage.

Spielberg offers very little in the way of re-creation in this early section of his Oscar-nominated film. Mostly the hostage situation is experienced through stock footage: ABC’s news coverage, especially, with the voices of Jim McKay, Peter Jennings and Howard Cosell guiding us through the events, which ended with all 11 Israeli athletes dead.

In fact, the bulk of the film has very little do with the Olympic games, or with the city of Munich. Instead, we follow a team of Mossad-backed assassins as they travel around the globe in an attempt to avenge the killings.

But even if Spielberg’s decision to show us so little of Munich makes sense – the movie is less about the Palestinians’ actions than about how terrorism inevitably begets more terrorism – it’s also a disappointment, especially for anyone eager to understand more about the city and the dark cloud of history under which it has often struggled.

The Munich of 2006 is a place alive with intriguing tensions: Located in the heart of Germany’s most traditionally Catholic and conservative Bavarian region, it nonetheless continues to attract an increasingly younger and more yuppified population – and, with those yuppies, all the attendant hip bars, high-end restaurants and trendy art galleries.

It’s also a city that seems to cherish many aspects of its history, even as it still hasn’t entirely reckoned with some of its darkest memories.

Spend a few days here, and you don’t necessarily come to any easy conclusions. It’s a vibrant, inviting city that inevitably stirs up many mixed feelings – and a journey into the past that is at once clear-eyed and fuzzy.

The sixtysomething waitress is narrow and bony, and the lines on her face suggest many years spent disapproving of others’ behavior. She’s bedecked in a traditional German dress that even one of the Von Trapp children might find a tad kitschy (which probably goes a long way toward explaining her dour disposition).

OK, the service here at Weisses Brauhaus isn’t likely to go over well with the Zagat set. But the German “Brauhauser” (beer hall) and “Biergarten” (beer garden) tradition dates back hundreds of years, and stepping into one of the dozens of beer halls that line Munich’s central area – the Marienplatz – you might as well have entered a time machine.

At the cavernous Hofbrauhaus, which bills itself as the world’s most famous beer hall, hundreds of patrons cram together at wooden tables, loudly clinking their liter glasses of beer and singing along (even more loudly) to traditional German folk music.

The food is hearty (think lots of sausage, sauerkraut and some sort of concoction that resembles potato salad); the seating is elbow to elbow, family style; the beer flows copiously, as the waiters and waitresses – wearing Hansel-style style knickers and Gretel-style dresses – speed through the room, elbowing out of the way tourists who dare to stand and gawk.

In America, this kind of restaurant would be nothing more than an enjoyable, cheesy tourist attraction. In fact, there’s a Hofbrauhaus outpost in Las Vegas, across from the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.

But what’s striking about both Hofbrauhaus and the Weisses Brauhaus is how many locals clutter the tables. Historically, beer halls were as much civic meeting places as they were social settings. (I was hardly surprised to learn from my guidebook that Hitler held some of his earliest meetings at the Weisses Brauhaus; the beer hall displays that sort of cramped, smoke-filled, alcohol-sloshed atmosphere – not unlike American fraternity basements – that lends itself to group-think.) And they still seem to be places where a local soccer team’s victory is celebrated, or where a group of friends gather for a spirited night out.

In short, Munich seems to be a city that is much too proud of its Bavarian heritage to let it fade into the history books. But it’s not a place that’s drowning in Old World nostalgia either, like, say, Vienna.

In that spirit, there is perhaps no greater pleasure in all of Munich than spending a long afternoon wandering through the Marienplatz. The cobblestone streets are lined with stores and stalls selling meats, sausages, vegetables, fruits, wine, cheeses, pastry and flowers, all of it so fresh-looking that the owners of Whole Foods would probably want to hide beneath a rock and weep in jealousy.

If you get hungry (and you will), you can easily put together a gourmet lunch – a chunk of cheese from one stall, a freshly prepared prosciutto sandwich (on pretzel bread, natch) from another, a bottle of Rhine Valley riesling from a third – for less than 20 euros ($23.95) and enjoy it in the middle of the bustle of shoppers and merchants.

You might feel like you’re wandering through 18th-century Bavaria, but this is no Epcot-style display put on for tourists. It’s a living, breathing atmosphere that begs to be relished and savored.

The bus carrying us from the subway station through the town of Dachau is packed with people – so crowded that you have to cling to complete strangers in order to maintain balance. It’s a cold and rainy Saturday afternoon, and my first thought is that all of these people (like me) are traveling to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial.

It’s only much later – after reading my guidebook and talking to our Dachau tour guide – that I learn that the reason the bus is so packed is that the suburb of Dachau has become, in the last decade or so, an extremely popular neighborhood for Munich residents. Its location halfway between the airport and the city center makes it especially desirable.

If it seems strange that so many Germans would feel perfectly comfortable living in a town most famous for its concentration camp, it also speaks to how many modern-day Germans seem to deal with the grimmer aspects of their nation’s history.

For all of the city’s evident historical pride on display in the Marienplatz, a different sensibility seems to rule elsewhere. It’s not so much that modern-day Munich denies its Nazi past as it is that it appears, from my brief visit and the few people I spoke with, that they would rather not have to contend with it. (When I mentioned to two Germans I met later in my trip that I spent an afternoon touring Dachau, both gave me the same puzzled, “Now why you would want to do that?” expression.)

Built in 1933, the Dachau concentration camp was one of the first established by the Nazis, and its physical layout became the model for dozens of other camps throughout Europe. If you’ve visited other concentration camps, particularly Auschwitz in Poland, all of this will looking horrifyingly familiar: the imposing wrought-iron entrance gates; the watch-tower; the train tracks that run nearby, to carry new prisoners there daily; the banal-seeming barracks that appear no different from those that populate summer camps in bucolic towns in America.

Visiting Dachau is a sometimes frustrating experience. Many of the original buildings and barracks were destroyed in the immediate aftermath of the war, so much of what you see is re-created. But the trip is still fascinating, especially in its details.

You learn that the camp – which was never really used for widespread exterminations but instead was a “work camp” – housed its own brothel, where female prisoners sometimes worked and where male prisoners were sometimes sent as a reward. You also learn that long after the war, the camp was used for various purposes, including as a prison and for housing Eastern European refugees, until finally survivor groups convinced the German government that a memorial site should be established there.

And in a faraway corner of the camp, near where barracks once stood, just over a fence, you see perhaps the most telling detail of all – a row of perfectly ordinary suburban houses that seem to have been built within the last two decades. For these Munich residents, the Dachau concentration camp is literally in their back yard.

The first thing you notice as you approach the Olympic Park in 2005 is how quiet and contemplative it all seems – a pastoral oasis from the busy freeway, and all the symbols of globalization, that exist just beyond the park grounds.

The second thing you notice is that Bon Jovi is playing here in May. Olympic Park is now a major civic center for Munich, with sporting events (especially soccer), trade shows and concerts keeping the main venues – including the 75,000-plus seat Olympic stadium and the 14,000-seat Olympic Hall – filled throughout the year.

The best reason to visit is to soak in the architecture: The famed “webbed” domes that partially cover each of the venues. Although they’re composed of glass and steel, the effect from a distance is that of a vast spider web, stretching across the entire park. At the Olympic stadium, this gleaming steel is offset by the bright green of the stadium seats and lawn – a stark and beautiful contrast between modernism and earthiness.

The main thing missing from the Olympic Park? Any sense of what happened here in 1972. Other than a modest memorial to the slain Israeli athletes – so modest I walked past it twice before recognizing what it was – you would have no idea that the Olympics ended in tragedy.

In the end, Munich seems to have a selective memory. It’s a place whose unwillingness to fess up to the past is precisely the thing that keeps it pulsing into the future.

You understand why Spielberg stayed away (literally; he shot his film in Paris, Budapest, Malta and New York). It would take at least a three-hour movie, if not one much longer, even to begin to reckon with such a city’s inner conflicts.