In Sen. Obama, Berliners Love What They See

"The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christians and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down."
-- Sen. Barack Obama

The late John F. Kennedy came in 1963 and proclaimed to 120,000 Germans at the Rauthus Shoenberg, “ ich bin ein Berliner.” In 1987, Ronald Reagan spoke before 20,000 at the Brandenburg Gate and shouted, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down these walls!” And last night, Barack Obama, his voice soaring above a crowd of 200,000 and an angel who sat atop a column in Teirgarden Park, implored Germans to join the United States of America in “remaking the world.”

But both Reagan and Kennedy were presidents. And Last night, in 2008, Barack Obama, presumptive candidate for the democratic party, came to Berlin as a first-term U.S. senator and “as a citizen of the world;” and there are no modern historical parallels for such a speech:that a mere senator of another country eschew tradition and dare step onto the world stage to give such a historic speech was unprecedented.

Nonetheless, all of Germany seemed to take to him with ease, greeting him with applause and respect every step of the way. And Sen. Obama did not disappoint, telling them what they wanted to hear. His speech slowly gathering steam, he said that it’s time for greater cooperation between the U.S. and Germany; that it’s time to work together to end the war in Iraq and defeat terrorism in Afghanistan; that it’s time to provide solutions to the genocide in Darfur and the problem of global warming, to name a few. Raising his voice above an angel that sat atop a column above him, moving into the rhetorical flash they had come to see, he told a mostly young crowd:

"People of Berlin – and people of the world – the scale of our challenge is great. The road ahead will be long. But I come before you to say that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. With an eye toward the future, with resolve in our hearts, let us remember this history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again."

The senator’s speech was interrupted many times with wild applause. Yes, Obama mania has come to Berlin. There are two reasons for this: First, Germans,like the rest of the world, has grown tired of the Bush administration’s war over diplomacy, cowboy approach to foreign affairs. They’ve grown sick of an unending Iraq war with no political solution in sight. Politically astute, they also know that Bush’s obsession with an illegal, presumptive war and continued occupation of Iraq has not only helped to bankrupt the U.S. economy. It has helped to destabilize the economies of other European nations as well, not to mention distract them from other pressing maters such as world poverty, genocide, the AIDs crisis and global warming.

Second, Germans, no strangers to war, feel a strong need to be hopeful; and, in Sen. Obama, they see not only the probable next president of the United States, but a ray of hope in an otherwise dismal future. They see an opportunity to once again be proud of German and U.S. relations. His positive message resonated especially with young Germans who seemed to welcome his challenge to them to step up and make a difference in the world. Thus, when Obama said, “This is our moment, our time,” they felt he was speaking especially to them.

Yes, Berliners seemed to love this African American, this citizen of the world and soon to be next president of the United States of America.