Déjà Vu at the World Cup Venue
Looking at Berlin's Olympic Stadium and anticipating the ever-nearing FIFA Soccer World Cup 2006, you cannot help but think of how this structure is coming to represent positive historical change in modern Germany. And yet, at the same time, it won't stop reminding you of its dark and not-so-secret past.
Visitors often get a strong and strange déjà vu feeling when entering the stadium. And how could it not seem familiar? We've all been here before, in one way or another. Either we've seen the pictures in history class or watched the films on television. Those famous black and white images taken during the 1936 Olympics still have a certain haunting quality to them and whenever one walks through this structure it is undeniably recognizable as being the site of the 1936 Olympic Games - and a prime example of Hitler's Nazi architecture.
And being that everything here and around you was originally constructed under Nazi dictatorship, the Olympic Stadium and Olympischer Platz have understandably had their share of controversy. These buildings are, after all, a historical manifestation of Adolf Hitler's mad political dreams and will always produce a somewhat somber effect by being so.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they quickly decided to use the Olympic Games (already awarded to Germany in 1931) as a platform for propaganda. Then came World War II and the Games of 1936, in hindsight, took on the even uglier undertones then they produced before the war. These buildings suffered little damage during World War II - the Olympia Stadium is one of the few Nazi-built structures still intact and in use - and after the war, the United Kingdom used them as its headquarters during the military occupation and right on up until 1994.
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