We already know that Barack Obama can be many things to many people, but could anyone have guessed that he would also be a good German?
In honor of the Democratic candidate's visit to Berlin last week, Die Zeit, the Hamburg-based weekly, revealed for the first time that the Illinois senator's great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was an upstanding Alsatian farmer named Christian Gutknecht, who shoved off to America on Sept. 13, 1749. The article was titled "The German Obama."
And not only was the German press trying to claim Obama for their own last week, they were wishing and hoping that more of their leaders would be more like him. On the morning the Democratic presidential candidate arrived in Berlin, the sensational conservative tabloid Bild ran a hilarious feature titled, "Make us an Obama," which featured head shots of five German politicians morphed into a picture of Obama. These new Obamaized German politicians had remade names: Angela Omerkel, for example, under a strangely compelling version of the German chancellor crossed with Obama and notably sporting his short, short, short haircut.
The rest of the paper's coverage was breathless. "Why does the black Obama excite us so much?" asked one headline. The answer: "In his words, we hear a better future. In his aura, we see a glorious, righteous America. Hope is in his eyes. ... He is young! . . . . He is multiculti and modest! . . . . He doesn't talk, he preaches! . . . . He stands for freedom! . . . . He's not Bush! . . . . Welcome, Mr. Hope!"
It's one thing for Americans to get all hot and bothered about Obama, but it's another to see famously sober Germans get all wound up about a foreign presidential candidate. Obama came to Germany just to strike a presidential pose, and as many as 200,000 Berliners were willing to serve as unpaid extras in what was essentially a political advertisement.
On one level, Obama's popularity in Germany has everything to do with George W. Bush's failed presidency and the transatlantic tensions caused by the Iraq war. But on another, it has everything to do with the decline in German political culture.
"This is a German problem," said Wolfgang Nowak, a former high-level advisor to Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. "The sad news is that no single German politician could get one-tenth of Obama's audience. He's telling us that politics can be different. It doesn't have to be dirty, that we can all work together."
