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Nazis advocating friendship between nations – The logics of propaganda in the 1936 Berlin Olympics Aimed at displaying the “brave new Germany” to the attending international sporting community and media audiences in the rest of the world, the 1936 Berlin Olympics constituted an unprecedentedly massive propaganda show, planned and organised with the greatest care. Domestically, a simultaneous goal was the “spiritual mobilisation” of the German people to consolidate the Nazi regime’s hegemony over them. In this article, we apply Arnd Krüger’s concept of concerted propaganda to denote the media-driven shaping of experiences and effacement of unfavourable associations to leverage positive images of the Nazi Germany at domestic and international scales. In particular, we inquire into the media industry’s roles in the production of experiences in the Berlin Olympics from three overlapping perspectives. First, we observe the ways in which cityscapes and mediascapes were entangled in the organising and staging of the 1936 Olympics. In the run-up to the Games, public spaces across Berlin were decorated and scrubbed of the signs of racist Nazi ideology and oppression. The intra-urban propaganda also included encouraging local people to actively participate in the production of a veneer of hospitality. Second, we pay heed to press-, radio- and television-associated technologies in the propagandist narrativisation and atmospheric intensification that occurred around the Olympic mega-event. According to Joseph Goebbels, the press is “a great keyboard which the government can play.” Meanwhile, radio was a central instrument in the Nazi’s Olympic propaganda. Along Berlin’s major arterial road during the Olympics, the so-called Via Triumphalis, loudspeakers were perched on lampposts, ensuring that people outside the main venues were also kept abreast of and emotionally captivated by ongoing Olympic events. Third, we analyse the production process, dramaturgic choices, and reception of Leni Riefenstahl’s artistic propaganda documentary Olympia, premiered a year and a half after the Berlin Olympics. Generously sponsored by the Nazi state, Olympia sought to perpetuate perfected shots on the athletes’ bodily beauty, kinetic aesthetics and enthralled spectator masses. In conclusion, we discuss the characteristics of the media-driven production of experiences during the heyday of state propaganda, in a historic context in which sporting mega-events had achieved a status as widely popular entertainment. The Berlin Olympics broke previous spectator and radio-listener records, and strengthened the Nazis’ ideological sway over people in Germany, in particular.

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