In 2014 I lived in Berlin for a couple of months and on a bright warm day I visited the Olympic Stadium. 
Architectural ingenuity and aesthetic splendor aside I couldn’t help but think about why the stadium was built. It could have been because I was studying the WWII era of German history but I thought about Olympia and an architectural style referred to as Nazi architecture.
Both the architectonic features and the Olympic Games of 1936 were components of the Nazi propaganda machine under Göbbels. Germany won 89 medals during the 1936 Summer Olympics, 33 of which were Gold. The size and material are extremely reminiscent of a roman coliseum. 
According to Christopher Thomas Gaffney, author of Temples of the Earthbound Gods: Stadiums in the Cultural Landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires (2008)
Stadiums matter to us because they are places where we share common emotions in a common place in a limited time frame…Stadiums are the sites of unforgettable human dramas and mundane realities.
Jesse Owen’s victories in the Berlin Olympic Stadium did not halt Nazi advances across Europe, but they did diminish the glories of self-styled Aryan race.
Interesting post, Marquese! It is so interesting that you were able to integrate what you were learning about in Berlin with what we talked about in class/read about in “Temples of the Earthbound Gods”. It is fascinating that stadiums can serve as such poignant reminders of the events that occurred around/in them. Another example of this is the Olympiastadion in Munich. When I visited this past summer, there were many reminders of the massacre of the Israeli Olympians. The stadium cannot be seen outside the socio-political context of the massacre. There aren’t many other spaces of human creation that can take on meaning like stadiums, which make them an important part of everyday life outside of their role in sport.
Great point Marquese! The “Temples of Earthbound Gods” definitely made me think about Olympiastadion and its past. Stadiums are somewhat weird in that they bring people so much joy but also have the ability to cause pain (or rather the governments who built the stadiums). Olympiastadion reminds me a great deal of Tempelhof – at first both entities were used to project this image of Nazi power and have since been used to benefit people and Berlin.
Interesting post that speaks to exactly what we are studying in this class. I’m sure it was fascinating to read about a place you had been to in the Gaffney book.