On a Saturday in late September 2026, Germany turns inward to ask a question that is really about identity: what kind of nation does it wish to present to the world through the ancient ritual of the Olympic Games? The German Olympic Sports Confederation votes among Munich, Berlin, and the Cologne-Rhine-Ruhr region — each city carrying its own history, its own wounds, and its own vision of what sport and civic life can mean. Munich leads on paper, but the choice reaches beyond evaluation scores into the deeper question of how a country reconciles memory, ambition, and the cost of dreaming on a