This series is the Cassandra of our time

If there's something we don't need for the 50th anniversary, it's a film about the Munich Olympic attack. The events have been re-enacted half a dozen times with actors - including Steven Spielberg in "Munich". Another half-dozen long documentaries deal with it. All newsrooms are producing articles these days, and all with practically no new knowledge. The media history commemoration machinery just has to turn.

Now the mini-series "Munich Games" is coming to Sky. And it begins with the iconic images of the hooded terrorist on the balcony of the Olympic Village. But immediately afterwards we are obviously no longer in 1972, but in the present, in Berlin and in Munich, with the BND, with the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, with Mossad agents operating in Germany.

Everyone is nervous. Everyone knows about the upcoming commemoration day and the game between a German and an Israeli soccer team, with which the bond between the two countries is to be demonstrated in the Olympic Stadium. And then, somewhere deep in the dark web, a hint of a new planned assassination at the game surfaced.

The Israelis discover the clue, not the Germans. That's salt in old wounds. The German security forces already screwed up the hostage rescue in 1972, the German reconnaissance had already overslept in 1972!

Aren't the Federal Republic's services far too divided to be able to trust them? Who passes on which information to whom and which not? Who has what intentions?

“Munich Games” is first and foremost a story of rivalry between secret services. You know the kind of claims made after an attack that a warning had been received beforehand but ignored.

But gradually a much more monstrous shadow rises in the background and with that we are no longer simply dealing with history that repeats itself, but with history that is being continued and rewritten. And with an intelligent concept for dealing with an anniversary.

A good conspiracy story – and “Munich Games” is one – thrives on the conspiracy being embedded in as much of the reality that surrounds us as possible. One of the recognizable starting points here is the infiltration of German security services by right-wing extremists, another is the susceptibility of politicians who want to be elected to populism, which has not yet had an impact in Germany because it has neither been a crystallizing event nor a crystallizing figure found.

"Je suis Karl" - in cinemas last year - was about how a charismatic leader works single-mindedly towards the spark that starts the conflagration. "Munich Games" is another, possibly more realistic, subversive film - in the sense that nobody is actually planning a coup.

History teaches us that many upheavals were not the fruit of long-term planning, but were able to succeed because a revolutionary recognized the dynamics of a moment and used it resolutely.

The Federal Republic of 2022 in Philipp Kadelbach's six-part "Munich Games" series is exactly the Federal Republic that we know: a country that is still unsettled by its demons from the past, that wants good, as a world champion of globalization, highly susceptible to all conflicts in the world.

These open flanks are embodied by Maria Köhler, a German LKA officer with Lebanese roots, played by the newcomer Seyneb Saleh. She is assigned to a super-patriotic Mossad agent as a minder. She also has a husband with a small child and a young Syrian as lovers. The latter is also her informant from an Arab refugee camp.

Michal Aviram, the acclaimed inventor for the Israeli intelligence series Fauda, ​​has plotted a veritable heap of conflicts in Maria's character. Her co-author was Martin Behnke, who wrote, among other things, “Dark” and “Berlin Alexanderplatz”.

One should take the six 50-minute episodes in one go and be caught by the black clouds brewing with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. Director Philipp Kadelbach can do this wonderfully, as he has already proven in his “Parfum” mini-series.

One should also choose the original version with its mix of German, Hebrew, Arabic and English, because here language serves as a dramaturgical device with which to characterize or deceive, exclude or include.

“Munich Games” is one of those rare specimens that, disguised as a history lesson, conducts analysis of the present – ​​and on top of that, appears as Kassandra.