The stage is set for Sunday’s European Championship final between Spain and England, a drama of historic proportions, on a stage which is no stranger to history. Expected to attract an audience of more than 300 million in addition to the 71,000 spectators who will be packed under its rafters, there is no commentator nor player who will be easily able to ignore its murky past.
Built and financed on the orders of the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler for the 1936 Games, Berlin’s Olympiastadion might have been pulled down years ago. That it is still standing is due to the pledge made to “clarify rather than obscure” that past, what Germans refer to as the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a head-on confrontation with its history.
