Days before Barack Obama is scheduled to address Europe at the "Victory Column" -- a nineteenth-century landmark tainted by the city's Nazi past -- some Berliners were decrying their federal government's decision to deny him the more dignified Brandenburg Gate as a backdrop. They don't seem to realize that German Prime Minister Angela Merckel has simply handed the Democratic candidate for president another opportunity to shine. [/more]

The Brandenburg Gate was an entrance to the city in the mid-1700s, and gradually embellished with columns and a chariot-driving Victory statue at the top. While the gate is associated with Napoleon and Frederick the Great, it stood for most of the past 45 years within the Berlin Wall "no-man's-land," a mined and barbed-wired "death strip" dividing West Berlin from the communist East Germany that enveloped it.

As American conservatives are fond of pointing out, the Brandenburg Gate was where Ronald Reagan stood to challenge Mikail Gorbachov to "tear down this wall."  Of more significance to Europeans, however -- and to Obama -- was the June 1963 speech by John F. Kennedy, who declared himself to stand side-by-side with a generation of Germans living on the front lines of the Cold War. In somewhat flawed German -- and not at the gate, but from the balcony of West Berlin's City Hall -- Kennedy famously told Berliners that he was one of them. While his message was clearly directed at West Germans, his words, "Ich bin ein Berliner," gave a sense of promise and hope to people on both sides of the wall.

Kennedy, essentially, was saying: "I'm an American; but I'm also a citizen of the free world." This is a spirited message that Obama can make even more meaningful in post-Cold War Berlin, a city where one in four residents now claims direct heritage from another country. I suspect that Obama will speak of unity in democracy while applauding diversity. It's a message that will appeal to Germans, who have always fretted over their identity as Germans. At least three German governments have used national identity to launch wars against their neighbors. Now, Germany is struggling to be an even-handed, open-minded world leader -- in the model of significant Americans who helped rebuild the country following World War II.

Obama's message will also appeal to Europeans, who are successfully constructing a union of historically warring states -- a social-democratic United States of Europe. More than anything else, perhaps, the European Union is rising on the American values of democracy and diversity.

No surprise, then, that the European media is calling Barack "the next Kennedy," who didn't require a high-profile monument like the Brandenburg Gate to tell the world about America's willing participation.  

Obama and his fans may note that the Victory Column ("Siegessaeule") was conceived during the American Civil War, a time of relative peace in Germany. The monument was relocated and appropriated by the Nazis, but it was born at moment in history when a diverse people began to identify themselves as "German." Now, Europe is working to put its many bloody wars behind it, celebrating its diversity and unity on a grand scale.

The United States has been, for many, the source and best practitioner of these very same ideals. Good will, diversity, equality, and democratic government are distinctly American values.  I predict that Barack Obama will stand proudly before the "Victory Column" and hammer them home for Americans, as well as for people around the world.

Our stuff gets packed into a big shipping container today for the 3,000-mile trip to Germany.

We're picking up and moving to a rented apartment on the west side of Berlin, where I hope to document the progress of that town toward environmental sustainability.

[More]

As a longtime West Virginian who likes Barack Obama, it's sad to see everyone -- from the media to the candidate himself -- predicting his defeat in Tuesday's state primary.

One can't help but contrast it with the 1960 primary, in which John Kennedy was the winner - also surprising everyone. But at least he tried - and the state meant so much more to the campaign and the country in those days.  Kennedy's only Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey, quickly dropped out of the national race the night he lost the West Virginia primary.

[More]

    I was just reading about the anniversary of a German counter-culture convention that took place in January 1978.

Fifteen-hundred students gathered at the Technical University, in Berlin. One veteran of the event said it was full of "craziness and truth" -- a time in which young people didn't merely want to discuss an alternative society; they wanted to live it -- either there in Berlin or "someplace else."

[More]