Five Ring Circus – The Olympic Games and Their World, 1896-2021
No global spectacle more vividly mirrors our modern world’s manners and mores than the Olympic Games. These recurring extravaganzas have never been about sport alone. Using the entire 125-year history of the Modern Olympic movement as a prism, this course ponders what the ongoing Olympic carnival can tell us about evolving national political pecking orders; global power relationships; cultural values and styles; attitudes toward race, gender and social class; and the influence of commerce, advertising and media in public life. We will see that in the last sixty years the Games have grown exponentially in size, cost and demands on host cities. There have been boycotts, political protests (even by athletes), and terror attacks, belying the Games’ message of peace and international harmony. This course could not be more timely given the recent postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games due to the Corona Virus pandemic. More than ever, we must ask whether these exciting (and sometimes glorious) pageants are worth the enormous costs, environmental depredations, and logistical demands.
Clay Large, David
David Clay Large obtained a Ph.D. in History from U.C. Berkeley in 1974. He has taught at Berkeley, Smith College, Montana State University, and Yale University, where he was also a college dean (Pierson College). A specialist on modern Western and Central Europe, Large has published some twelve books on such topics as West German rearmament in the Adenauer era, Wagnerism in European politics and culture, urban studies (histories of Munich and Berlin), immigration politics during the Holocaust, the German-hosted Olympic Games (1936 and 1972), and the Grand Spa-towns of Central Europe. The German edition of his Berlin book, Biographie einer Stadt, was a Der Spiegel bestseller and a source for the popular TV series Berlin Babylon. He has appeared frequently as a “talking head” in NBC and PBS documentaries on the Olympic movement and on German television as an expert commentator on the histories of Munich and Berlin. Currently, he offers courses through the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco and serves as a Senior Fellow at U.C. Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies. He is also codirector of Berkeley’s Austrian Studies Program.