Berlin-Köpenick is both a point of return in the 1936 Olympic crew’s story and a place where the book’s later account confronts the enduring traces of Nazi persecution. The boys came back there after a night in Berlin to find Joe Rantz awake, alone with his medal; years afterward, the narrator walked its streets and paused at the vacant site of a synagogue that had once stood on Freiheit.

Setting and Place

In August 2011, the narrator traveled from the Olympic Stadium to Berlin-Köpenick, in what had formerly been Soviet-occupied East Berlin. Its cobblestone streets ran among ancient buildings that had mostly survived the war, though occasional brick facades remained scarred by shrapnel. The physical fabric of the place thus held both continuity and visible damage: streets and buildings persisted, but not without marks of the violence that had passed through them.

Berlin-Köpenick is distinct from Grünau, where the regatta grounds on the Langer See stood and where the 1936 race had taken place. The narrator visited both: Berlin-Köpenick offered streets and a charged absence in the built landscape, while Grünau brought him back to the water and finish line associated with the victory.

The Crew’s Return in 1936

After the race, the boys went out in Berlin, with Joe Rantz the sole exception. The details of their trouble were recorded only obscurely in Chuck Day’s journal, which noted that they had talked their way out of several places and encountered police. At four-thirty in the morning, they were still stumbling through central Berlin, arms over one another’s shoulders and singing “Bow Down to Washington.” They did not return to Berlin-Köpenick until ten-thirty that morning, nursing severe hangovers.

At the police academy, they found Joe Rantz had spent the night awake. He had been staring at his gold medal as it hung from the end of his bunk, contemplating what it meant. The contrast gives Berlin-Köpenick a quiet role in the story’s aftermath: while the other rowers’ celebration spilled through the city and ended in a late return, Joe’s solitary vigil marked a shift in what he understood the victory to mean.

The Synagogue Site and Historical Memory

During his 2011 walk, the narrator passed the vacant lot on Freiheit where Berlin-Köpenick’s synagogue had stood until the night of November 9, 1938. He thought of the Hirschhahn family. The passage gives the site significance through what is no longer there: amid streets and buildings that had mostly endured, the empty lot made the history of persecution present without describing the synagogue as a surviving structure.

The juxtaposition of the two visits to Berlin-Köpenick—one in the immediate aftermath of an American sporting triumph, the other decades later—places personal memory beside a history of loss. The crew’s return belongs to the rhythms of celebration, exhaustion, and reflection; the later walk directs attention to the Jewish family and community evoked by the synagogue’s absence. The location therefore connects the boys’ remembered presence with a past that cannot be recovered simply by revisiting the streets.