blog - gObama 2008
Friday, July 25, 2008
(Berlin, Germany - 9.00 a.m. local time)
A massive crowd of 215.000 people filled up the street 17th of June stretching towards the Victory Column. They waited 3 hours to hear Obama speak live in the heat. WOW! Record numbers for a political rally since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.
Obama chose the loaded symbolic backdrop of the Victory Column that was erected to celebrate Prussia’s aggressive imperial wars in 1873. He transformed it into a symbol for the victory of liberty and freedom (not Bush’s good over evil) in 2008. Unthinkable that this rhetorical gesture would work, especially since Hitler propaganda used the column to spread fantasies and racist lies for a Third Reich Empire. It might be a victory over the Cold War atrocities and this is how Obama re-mixed the iconic statue to inspire freedom and unity for the rest of the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Victory_Column
The world has changed profoundly because Obama, being the son of an Kenyan man and an American woman would have been either killed, sterilized or deported if he would have dared to speak up on his ideas of global citizenship 70 years ago in Berlin.
So it was no surprise that Obama addressed the historic dimensions and the responsibility of Berlin as a world citizen and not as a politician - although that was rhetorical. But by drawing strength from his father’s and mother’s ancestors, he once healed his own wounds and does the same for our troubled state of affairs.
In historic terms he acts almost like a redeemer for painful memories and committed crimes. This seems to be his role on the world stage - to redeem and reconcile differences in a gracious and relaxed way. A quality that makes even his rhetorical gestures not sound too pathetic but rather visionary or prophetic - no other politician currently has this much drive.
What a day for Berlin’s complicated history to see an Afro-American speak under blessings from the Golden Angel that Wim Wenders once used poetically and beautifully in his film:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Desire
Everyone prays and secretly hopes that this will be a turning point in the fate of America’s and Germany’s role in the history of mankind...
This needs be seen in political actions not words on a bombastic stage and a feel-good setting of a multi-kulti crowd.