You don’t expect to see security guards roaming the foyer of the Hannover State Opera, a well-regarded, midsize opera house in a midsize central German city. But before the Saturday premiere of “Echo 72: Israel in Munich,” a new opera about the attack on Israeli athletes by Palestinian militants at the 1972 Munich Olympics, at least four guards tried to blend into the crowd, surveying audience members as they arrived.
The biggest challenge is fear, and the fear is everywhere, said Laura Berman, the Hannover State Opera’s artistic director. The fear is in all the people who participate in the project.
While “Echo 72” was first envisioned in 2021, its premiere came at a time when tensions over the war in Gaza are running high in Germany’s culture scene. After Hamas’s brutal assault on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s deadly retaliation in Gaza, many artists here who had criticized Israel had shows canceled, prizes suspended, and talks called off.
The challenge of making art in such a polarized society is enormous, Berman said. Recently, the debate has become so shrill that exhibitions and performances only loosely related to the Middle East have been hit with protests.
In this charged atmosphere, the new opera and the movie “September 5” — which dramatizes the same events and came out in German movie theaters this month — are challenging how Germany remembers its history, at a time when the overlap between that story and Israel’s is especially fraught.
At the heart of both is the paradox of the 1972 Munich Olympics. With World War II and Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics still in relatively recent memory at the time, Germany wanted to hit reset and present itself to the world as a reformed country. Instead, a violent attack against Israeli Jews on German soil was broadcast around the world.
On Sept. 5, 1972, Palestinian militants from the Black September group broke into the Olympic Village, killed two Israeli athletes and took nine others hostage in the hopes that they could force the release of Palestinian prisoners and left-wing extremists from Israeli and German jails. A botched attempt by the German police to release the hostages ended in a shootout that led to the death of the nine athletes and a police officer.
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