Winterrise am Olympia Stadion
When Klaus Gruber proposed to me to “dress” the mythical stadium of 1936 Olympic Games, I accepted without any haw.
I begun to wander across Berlin, with the fixed idea that after all what we are looking for is always around as. Typical way of thinking when you are in search of some idea and you don’t find any. Never less one idea became to me more and more present: I should have “undressed” this stadium, to take away the dust of History, to see it as naked.
Wandering about aimlessly in the Berlin freezing winter, I felt hungry; at the border of a wide open ground I noticed an “Imbiss” and I made a rest to eat a “Bratwurst”.
All the ground around was covered of bushes growing hardly among piles of rubble covered with moss. Over all impended a shadow of gloom, silence, waste and tragedy.
Suddenly, more as in a nightmare than in a dream I see it like it always had been there, majestic, so imposing to dazzle my eyes: the old Anhalter Bahnhof!
Really in front of me I could see the ruins of the old great station. It was the starting point of the railway lines connecting Berlin to East Europe. However that heap of rubble had the same spell of the drawings and engravings of the classical ruins that the travellers of the “Grand Tour” used to take during their journey in Italy.
Indeed the almost uninjured great doorway emerged over all in the typical architectural form of the triumphal arch: triumphal arch for the anonymous traveller, for the haughtily vanquisher with his retinue of vanquished. Yes the vanquished of war, of racialism that silently started on the journey that ended in Auschwitz.
Away from the Stadium those goals crossed by the fleeting triumphs of the puppets of football! To make place to that ruined arch, a symbol of the appalling tragedy that the hitlerian olympic games forewarned.