(Credit: © Sandra Then)

The sounds of history often linger, echoing into the present in ways that demand our attention. Sometimes they whisper, unsettling but distant; other times, they crash through with devastating force.

In Germany, the past is never far from the surface, but it has rarely felt as raw and urgent as it does now. At the Hanover State Opera, the world premiere of “Echo 72: Israel in München,” Michael Wertmüller’s searing new opera about the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, bowed at a tense and fragile moment, on the eve of elections that handed the Alternative for Germany (AfD) a record result. The far-right party is now the second largest in the
Bundestag.

It is a work about an act of political terror that forces audiences to confront one of the darkest episodes in Germany’s postwar history. And yet, despite its ferocious soundscape and brutal subject matter, “Echo 72” is not an opera about retribution. It is a plea for an honest reckoning with history, for memory, for empathy—an argument for art as a way of working through trauma and grief.

This is precisely the kind of work that Germany—and the world—needs right now. “Echo 72,” which streams though July at Operavision.eu, arrives in Germany at a particularly fraught time. Israel’s ongoing military operation in Gaza, in the wake of the October 7 attacks, has refocused attention on Germany’s “special relationship” with the Jewish State. In a country where mild criticism of Israeli policy can provoke accusations of antisemitism, “Echo 72” steps into a minefield. The opera’s creators—Swiss composer Michael Wertmüller, German librettist Roland Schimmelpfennig, and American director Lydia Steier—navigate this charged terrain with astonishing care, crafting a work that does not flatten history into a simple moral fable but instead forces its audience to sit in discomfort. At the center of “Echo 72” is the massacre itself: the moment when the world watched in horror as Palestinian gunmen, working in concert with radical German factions, took 11 Israeli Olympic athletes hostage. The West German police failed to prevent the slaughter; 27 years after the Holocaust, Jewish blood was once again shed on German soil. Yet instead of turning the massacre into dutiful sermon or vulgar spectacle, “Echo 72” evokes the carnage and the historical context in which it unfurled through fractured poetry, grotesque imagery, and an unrelenting musical onslaught. Wertmüller’s score is a collision of styles—furious jazz, pulverizing death metal, disorienting electronic interludes—that capture the chaos and violence of history in sound. The opera begins with a relentless choral pulse, propelling the audience forward like an unstoppable force. A surreal, unsettling figure stalks the stage: a museum guard wielding a semi-automatic guitar, strumming and firing in bursts of jagged noise. A female fencer, her body trapped in a glass vitrine, gasps out lines of sprechstimme and coloratura, a suffocating embodiment of athletic grace turned to horror.

For all its sonic ferocity, “Echo 72”is not merely an opera of rage. It is also an opera of mourning. An infernal orchestral interlude in the middle of the piece leaves the audience in a suspended state, as if caught in the moment between life and death. The final moments of the opera, building to a furious orchestral crescendo, are devastating in their directness: the chorus shouts, screams, and wails, “Darkness fills everything.” In a moment when empathy often feels like an impossible demand, “Echo 72” insists upon it. That the most vital new German opera of the season premiered in Hanover, rather than in one of the country’s cultural powerhouses, like Berlin or Munich, is also significant. Hanover’s outgoing general director, Laura Berman, an American, has led the State Opera with a commitment to bold, risk-taking work—precisely the kind of projects that are under threat as deep budget cuts loom over cultural institutions throughout Germany (the Berlin Senate recently slashed 12 percent of its overall cultural budget). With shrinking resources, audacious pieces like “Echo 72”—works that challenge audiences, that confront history rather than sanitize it—will become increasingly rare. If the difficult effort of grappling with the past is left undone, the void will not remain empty for long. Because even as “Echo 72” was premiering in Hanover, a very different echo of Germany’s past was sounding elsewhere.

That same evening, roughly 4,500 people gathered in Halle to hear Elon Musk address a rally for the AfD. Fresh off his Nazi salute that made international headlines, Musk stood before the crowd and told them, in his meandering way, that Germany had “too much of a focus on past guilt.” He then recalled Julius Caesar’s praise for Germanic warriors and lamented a multiculturalism that “dilutes everything.” His words came just days before the 80th
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It was a message the AfD faithful understood well. The party’s leaders have long sought to minimize the Nazi era, casting it as little more than a footnote – what party figure Alexander Gauland once called a mere “speck of bird shit” – in the grand sweep of German history. Their vision of a Germany unshackled from its past is, of course, nothing new. But it is a vision that gains strength when the cultural institutions responsible for remembrance—when the theaters and opera houses and museums that force Germany to reckon with its history—are weakened.

The question is which vision of Germany will prevail.

In “Echo 72,” history does not vanish, nor is it reduced to an abstraction. It is felt in the body, in the voice, in the breathless exhaustion of those who bear witness. It is an opera that does not turn away from trauma but instead asks whether art can help us live with it, whether it can offer a space where the past can be confronted rather than erased. And at a time when the AfD, and men like Musk, tell Germans to forget, “Echo 72,” reminds them why they must remember.