Olympia

Dennis Bock's Olympia takes its starting point from imagined outtakes of Leni Riefenstahl's notorious film of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. From there it follows one family who live in the long shadow of twentieth-century history. The family are German immigrants who arrived after the war, and their story is told by their son Peter, who was born in the New World and grew up in the sixties and seventies. Famous figures and events of the mid-century brush against this family, but the book keeps its focus on their private lives, with their large failures and small victories. Ruby fights to rise above her leukemia. Her father is fascinated by severe weather and deadly tornadoes. Elsewhere a saint witnesses a miracle at the bottom of a drowned Spanish village. The backdrop is a pair of Olympic moments: the polished, sinister Nazi showpiece of Berlin in 1936, and the 1972 Munich hostage-taking in which eleven Israelis were murdered. Through them the book looks at the tragic relationship between Germans and Jews across the century from a fresh angle. Olympia was Bock's debut.