SOURCE: Mackenzie, Michael. “From Athens to Berlin: The 1936 Olympics and Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia.” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 2 (winter 2003): 302-36.

In the following essay, Mackenzie analyzes Riefenstahl's representations of the athletic body in Olympia in terms of physical discourses that were popular in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s.

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In 1931, two years before the National Socialists seized power in Germany, Berlin was announced as the location of the 1936 Olympic games. The appointment to host the Olympics was for the Nazi state a problematic, burdensome inheritance from the Weimar Republic era. The ideologues of the Nazi party rejected the Olympic movement for its internationalism and pacifism, and, at first, it was uncertain that the Berlin games would actually take place.¹ Yet when the 1936 games did take place as scheduled, the National Socialist bureaucracy hosted the Olympics on “a lavish scale never before experienced”² and turned the games into a spectacle meant...