And rightly so, for now he is dead, and way too young . . . what’s that? No, I was never talking about Charlie Sheen, this is about the celebrity that was Knut the Polar Bear, whose adventures at the Berlin Zoo this weblog has occasionally covered over the years. Maybe to make myself clear I should have brought up Knut’s being featured on his own postage-stamp, or even the public calls in the past for his castration, but frankly, all of that and more seems well within the capability of the out-of-control 2 1/2 Men once-and-future star.

No, this is about Knut, and I guess I can take a sort of bittersweet pride in having realized, from the very beginning of my coverage, that “it is perhaps the life of a child movie star that provides an even more-exact template to what has been happening with Knut.” You’ll surely know by now that last Saturday, as he was lounging on an island in his Berlin Zoo enclosure (which he shared with the aforementioned three female polar bears – who somehow seemed to want little to do with him) the lumbering grayish bear suddenly stood up, spun around a couple of times, fell into the water and was gone. Well, at least you probably heard that he died; those additional details I got from having the fortune to hear an interview on the BBC World Service with the Berlin Zoo Bear Dept. Head Heiner Klös. The interviewer put Klös on the spot (as BBC interviewers are increasingly wont to do with their subjects in recent years), accusing him of feeding Knut too many of the infamous croissants he was mad about. Yes, OK, there were croissants, Klös stammered in his reply, but mostly the keepers made sure he received the sort of wholesome meat-and-vegetables diet a still-growing young polar bear requires.

Anyway, while Knut was never in what you could call polar bear athletic shape, it’s unlikely it was anything in his diet that caused his death at age 4 – untimely, as polar bears in captivity are routinely known to live forty years or more. Just what it was remains something of a mystery; it was not a tumor, for example, as Christina Hucklenbroich of the FAZ let us know in an article of yesterday, although it did seem to involve some disease in his brain. Nothing in the environment provided to him at the Berlin Zoo was at fault, either – despite calls from no less than the Financial Times Deutschland for polar-bear enclosures across Europe to be subject to “stress tests.” (For real – although I suspect the piece is written tongue-in-cheek.) Nor did it have anything to do with any sort of in-breeding – Knut’s mother was a full-blooded wild polar bear out of Canada, Zoo Director Bernhard Blaszkiewitz assured the assembled press hordes.

Of course, it was that very same mother-bear who started Knut off on his celebrity adventure in the first place by rejecting him and thus making it necessary that he be raised in a rather more public fashion by the zookeepers. And although that life is now at an end, the legend (and, possibly, the need for further coverage here – whatever the traffic will bear, you might say) will surely live on. They want to raise a statue to him; his fur is already in the hands of expert taxidermists at a museum; and, inevitably, you know there is going to be a movie. For – relative to his species, at least – Knut lived fast and he died young: may I suggest “Polar Without A Cause”?

                          

These tours are run by Lobby Control (site only in German), a lobbyist-tracking NGO which, as the site’s headline reads, is “Active for Transparency and Democracy.” According to the Die Zeit piece, Berlin has it’s own “Iron Triangle” of lobbyists, actually a sort of Iron Trapezoid, running from the Reichstag to the Friedrichstrasse S-bahn station to the Gendarmenmarkt to Potsdamerplatz (respectively the NW, NE, SE and SW corners). Through it runs majestically the famous avenue Unter den Linden, unfortunately now known among many capital cynics as Unter den Lobbyisten – “among the lobbyists.” For €10 per person (cheap!), one of Lobby Control’s guides will take a group on a roughly 2 1/2 hour tour through this territoriy, stopping at 15 different locations to give a brief presentation (probably only in German) about each: trade association offices, PR agencies, and think-tanks, of course, but also such places as eateries and beer-halls where the heavy political back-slapping really goes on – such as the Ständige Vertretung restaurant on the River Spree, where the tour starts out.

Ironically, that restaurant’s name means “permanent representation,” but one has to assume it was originally inspired by the Big Power confrontations and negotiations that occurred in Berlin while the Cold War was raging rather than by any German politics. For as you might recall, it was that Cold War that made it quite impossible for Berlin to resume its role as the German capital until 1999 – which means that the lobbyists there are also a comparatively recent phenomenon. As the Die Zeit article notes – actually quoting the owner of Ständige Vertretung, who made the move himself to Berlin in 1999 – Bonn was a much more laid-back lobbying environment, mainly made up of trade associations (Verbände) happy mainly just to provide lawmakers with industry information.

That’s hardly the case any more in Berlin, of course. The city has lost whatever political innocence it may once have had; it is clearly “where it’s at” when it comes not only to German political power but – as we have seen played out with the Greek debt crisis – even European economic and financial power. And although there are reportedly only around 5,000 lobbyists actually at work there (as opposed to the 20,000 to be found in Brussels) Lobby Control assures us that plenty of business now takes place behind closed doors, out of sight of the German public. The associated scandals (or at least scandalous behavior) have already started coming to light, most especially lucrative “revolving door” arrangements whereby high political officials leave office to take up well-paid business or lobbying positions about which only the naive will wonder what they did to qualify for them. The prime example here is former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s move to Chairman of the Board of the German-Russian Nord Stream gas pipeline consortium, but there was also one Matthias Wissman, former Traffic Minister who left government to become head of the auto industry association.

The Lobby Control guides are Lobby Control people first, so they remain up-to-date on all the latest scandals and can weave the new stories effortlessly into the tour’s itinerary and their stop-by-stop spiel. Yes, this is truly a tourist excursion of a very different sort: for one thing, actual lobbyists have themselves been known to take the tour to benefit from the knowledge gained thereby. For another, the special nature also derives from a combination of the facts that 1) Tour participants rarely if ever actually gain access to the offices that house the relevant firms they are visiting, of course, but usually just stare at them from the outside as if they were caged zoo animals, and 2) The denizens of those offices don’t much like even that, so that there are sometimes hostile receptions, with security functionaries showing up to try to get the group to move on immediately from the office-atrium they are transiting, for example. There have even reportedly been attempts by such security personnel to dictate what can and cannot be spoken about by the tourguide at a particular stop; one assumes these are former German Democratic Republic functionaries.

Anyway, sounds very interesting, although unfortunately the tour seems to be conducted only in German. Those who are interested anyway (here is the page, scroll to the bottom for details) should be aware that the tours are conducted on only a twice-a-month schedule, and they always sell out.

                          

But not exclusively so. One difference between the two cities that leaps out him he describes in his latest piece, The eyes lying in ambush of the CCTV. He remembers back to his first visit to Berlin, a little over a year ago: what accounted for that strange feeling of freedom, of exaltation even, that he felt then while walking through the streets of the city center? Well, you already know the answer from his piece’s title. It was actually the absence of something that inspired such enthusiasm, the absence there of the closed-circuit TV cameras that, as he puts it, “bristle on every corner” in London.

To be sure, Espiner had previously rather perversely made use of his special journalist’s access to aggravate this hang-up of his: he managed to visit a monitoring center in London (a “dingy room, deep below the streets”), where he witnessed officials there using the cameras to zoom in – to a “scary” level of detail – on anyone who seemed “suspicious,” or else interesting to take a close look at for any other reason. Therefore, although coming back to Berlin he does observe a few more Video Überwachung signs than he noticed before, the apparent forebearance on the part of the Berlin authorities to spy on their own citizens is still quite refreshing.

The reason for all that is not hard to grasp: after all, as he does point out, some of those Berlin city authorities not so long ago lived under a Stasi regime, which itself followed a Nazi regime. Still, Espiner warns against any complacency – not necessarily in the face of officialdom suddenly changing its mind and deciding to bring in the cameras, but rather in the form of new private shopping centers and “gated communities” being built, which inevitably bring with them an associated bunch of such cameras, to provide “protection” and “security.”

Anyway, it turns out that you can check out his argument for yourself, as Der Tagesspiegel has taken to posting parallel versions of his columns in English. (No doubt the original English that Espiner wrote them in, of course; this one is called CCTV: Invasion of privacy.) I reveal that to you as a public service, even as it is an unwelcome development since you’ll no longer need the assistance of your neighborhood EuroSavant to read these particular columns from Der Tagesspiegel.

UPDATE: Please also be sure to see this: Spy Cameras Won’t Make Us Safer, from a renowned security expert, and including up-to-the-minute insights on the topic from the recent very professional assassination of that Hamas official in Dubai.

                          

It was a contest between residents of those two Berlin neighborhoods, Kreuzberg and Neukölln, waged across the ditch in the park’s middle (with combat photographers in attendance, of course; the on-line article has an amusing YouTube video.) In the end Kreuzberg was declared the winner, controversially, but most by that time were too tired to care and settled down instead to drinking Glühwein (wine mixed with spices, a Christmas drink) and letting a DJ entertain them.

                          

Actually, not really. I don’t mean that the subway-trains don’t run on time in Berlin, it’s quite likely that they do. Rather, it seems that they have recently addressed the entire issue of U-bahn efficiency – especially the problem of minimizing transfer times between one line and another – with a bit of higher mathematics, as Holger Dambeck recounts for us in Der Spiegel (Waiting faster).

Consider: you pull into a transfer-station in your one subway train and cast an anxious eye across the platform to where you rather hope the other subway-line to which you want to transfer has a train already waiting there for you. Of course, it’s rare that you’re so lucky; usually you’ll need to get out and wait for some period of time before that follow-on train ever arrives. And sometimes – oh, the frustration! – you do see the train there across the platform as your first train pulls into the station, yet the other train-driver can’t even wait a minute and instead pulls out of the station just as you are arriving!

Surely there must be some way to schedule all the arrivals and departures in some better fashion – not to ensure that there’s always a transfer-train there waiting for you as your first train arrives, that’s certainly asking for too much – but at least to ensure minimal transfer-times for all. Certainly there is: it turns out that that is simply a problem in Graph Theory! A complicated problem, to be sure, but it can be broken down to fairly simple fundamentals, as Dambeck does here by presenting the straightforward case of two lines running in one direction with only four stations and with a new train setting out every four minutes, for which you want to minimize the transfer times from one to another. The solution (it’s on the second page of this two-page piece, although the same diagram is on both) is that having the second train set off on its journey two minutes after the first does ensures minimal transfer times, namely two minutes whether you’re transferring from line 1 to 2 or vice-versa.

On the other hand, Berlin’s subway system is somewhat more complex, with nine lines (actually maybe 9-and-a-half, since a mini-line, the “U55″ or “Chancellor’s Line,” just opened on 8 August) and 170 stations, with special rules for the transfer-possibilities (if any) at each. Getting that right in Graph Theory requires some computer-power, in the hands of mathematicians who know what they are doing, in this case a team from the Technical University Berlin headed by one Christian Liebchen. (This guy’s last name, by the way, means “darling” or “sweetheart” – chouchou for those of you who are French.) Sure enough, Liebchen and his cohort have come up with a train-schedule for Berlin’s U-bahn about which they can claim “there is none better,” and it’s one that the subway authorities have put into practice. In the meantime, the public transport authorities in Potsdam (not far away; just to Berlin’s southwest) and the Netherlands Railroads (rather further away) have expressed an interest in availing themselves of this group’s expertise, while Liebchen himself has left academia for a well-paid job at the German Railways.

Such Graph Theory, by the way, according to the article can also be applied to solving Sudoku puzzles. But you should also be aware that Holger Dambeck is not any regular Spiegel journalist, but rather an author who likes to write about mathematics and who has a book he wants to sell you (if you read German): Numerator: Mathematics for everyone. A steal at only €7.95, with free delivery within Germany, Austria, and other neighboring countries, under certain multiple conditions which, even if you can handle the German, may take graph theory again to understand.

                          

Was there really a West Berlin – this walled-in, haunted city? Sunk into the past twenty years ago, she is to us today as distant and fantastic as the Moon.

Nice, but Büscher’s aim is ultimately not to wax lyrical about his forgotten West Berlin, as we can see from his piece’s simple title: “City of Spies.” Or, if you prefer, Operationsgebiet (“operations area”), West Berlin’s designation in the files of the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, or Stasi, the infamous East German secret police.

For it turns out that the Operationsgebiet was a veritable playground for the Stasi during the entire period back when there existed ideologically-hostile West and East Berlins. This shouldn’t be so surprising, though, if you think about it. One the one hand, West Berlin was a completely-enclosed area right at hand, in fact right next to what became the East German capital. And on the other, the Stasi was known to be very good at its job. Anyone who knows anything about what the DDR (“German Democratic Republic”) used to be like knows about the 100,000 or so inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (“unofficial co-workers,” or IM) the Stasi managed to plant among the East German population – basically police-spies tasked with reporting on anyone who expressed dissent, seemed planning to flee the country, and the like. This could be your child’s teacher or your neighbor (in fact, it probably was one of your neighbors) – it could even be your husband or wife.

It follows that the Stasi were just as effective in planting their IM inside of West Berlin, where their spying activities were of course of a somewhat different nature, having more to do with undermining the West Berlin government (and by extension that of West Germany, or the Federal Republic of Germany). Supposedly by the time the Wall fell there were from 800 to 1,000 of them in place, an impressive total both in itself and also when you consider they constituted about a quarter of IM/spies that the Stasi had working against West Germany all together. Now, twenty years and more later, and working together with other historians and experts to take advantage of data from the Stasi’s recovered files, Wolfgang Büscher can give us an initial summary of the extent and nature of the Stasi infiltration of West Berlin, in a somewhat-longish Die Zeit article and its accompanying “click-to-enlarge” map.

(Be advised, though, that the map is mostly useless. The print accompanying the variously-colored dots-with-circles is too small to read comfortably, even if you understand German, and anyway it’s supposed to denote places/institutions in the city that were infiltrated by Stasi IM. What’s the point of that, of putting a red circle on, for example, “U.S. Army Roosevelt Barracks”? We need more detail – was there someone there working for the Stasi who was really an “insider,” and if so, precisely in what capacity? Or was there just a bum with a camera constantly standing watch outside?)

Spies: From Bums to Highly-Placed Politicians

That “bum with a camera” is hardly an exaggeration; according to Büscher many of the IM in West Berlin were basically that, what he calls “barefoot IM,” generally pensioners deployed by the Stasi just as “observers of premises” (Objektbeobachter), armed with notebook and pencil and maybe a camera to record whatever they thought might be important. One report still in the files, for example, notified the East German spy-chiefs that male attendees at a leftist-militant meeting were wearing “jeans-pants”! Pathetic, yes, but unfortunately the IM also succeeded in pulling off rather nastier feats, and Büscher’s article lists a few:

• First, the more minor but vicious accomplishments, like the IM who passed through the Wall to visit East Berlin on a one-day pass (remember, posing as a West Berlin citizen), and used that limited time well to befriend a doctor over there who was willing to reveal to this “West Berlin visitor” his plans to escape across the Wall with his family – which information the IM of course then passed on to the Stasi. Or those who did their duty as IM in West Berlin for a while but then were mysteriously able to get back through the Wall to the East, where they gave press conferences denouncing the “neo-Nazi activity” they claimed to have witnessed over in the West.
  
  
• In 1981 one IM managed to divert to his East German masters the personnel files of 35,000 (!) employees of the West Berlin Senate and Verfassungsschutz (the latter basically functioned as an anti-crime and -subversion intelligence organization, like the FBI).
  
  
• Then there was William Borm, working for the Stasi all the time, who nevertheless succeeded in becoming Chairman of the Berlin local government (Landesvorsitzende) during the 1960s. He also managed to become something like president pro tem (Alterspräsident) of the West German lower house of Parliament (the Bundestag); his more-important speeches there, Büscher tells us, were written for him by Stasi-Chief Markus Wolf. Borm was also on record in the seventies as being highly critical of the Ostpolitik which the successive West German governments of Willy Brandt and then Helmut Schmidt pursued to lower tensions with the Communist bloc and with East Germany in particular; he said that that policy’s ultimate end could only be reunification of the two German states, which would gravely threaten world peace (and, indeed, that was the East German party line).
  
  
• Even more spectacular was the case of Karl-Heinz Kurras – not any highly-placed politician, but rather the West German police officer known to have fired the shot on June 2, 1967, which, during a student demonstration against the visit to West Berlin by the Shah of Iran, killed the 26-year-old Benno Ohnesorg (whose last name, ironically, means “without care” in German; yes, I guess that, after he expired, he was). It was Ohnesorg’s death that June evening that enraged and radicalized the entire West German student movement and led to much political ferment (and demonstrations, and riots, particularly in West Berlin) thereafter. In other words, this Kurras guy was like the National Guard soldiers who shot the students at the Kent State massacre of May 4, 1970. Yet his name was not really “Kurras”; in truth he was “Otto Bohl,” a Stasi IM somehow inside the ranks of the West Berlin police.
  

                          

In all, it’s an enormous ball of fluff, the groupie-tone of which you can appreciate by just taking a look at the accompanying video: maybe you won’t be able to understand the German, but that doesn’t matter so much, as you can rest assured that what is being expressed is the usual stuff of “He was an amazing man to meet!” and “I still think it was only a dream!” It’s obvious that the Economist’s linguistic and analytical talents would better have been employed addressing reaction to Obama’s Berlin visit and his speech coming from an actual representative of the serious German press – could it be that the Bild story was irresistible because it allowed a follow-on mention (check it out, it’s also right there in the Certain Ideas of Europe piece) of Obama’s picture right there on the Bild’s front cover above the topless-girl-of-the-day? Obama smiling and waving just above the fold; topless Claudia on her knees and looking towards the camera seductively just below the fold; the New Republic’s weblog The Plank thoughtfully reproduces that front page shot here. (To be fair, this is of course hardly the only piece the Bild Zeitung delivers about Obama’s visit. Then again: it’s only the Bild Zeitung, whose very name means “Picture Newspaper,” thereby making clear where its editorial priorities lie.)

Obama groupie-love, topless model: how very . . . remarkable! (*Sniff*) But never mind, beloved EuroSavant audience, let’s go make that ramble through (some of) the serious German press that, for whatever reason, our MSM colleagues at the Economist eschewed.

Stuck in Berlin’s “Front-Line Myth”

At the Siegessäule

At the peak of the serious German press – actually a weekly newspaper with a higher degree of commentary in its pieces than sheer reporting, along the lines of the Economist itself – is Die Zeit, so let’s start with Yes, we can hope! (title in English), by Christoph Seils. “The party is over, the Superstar has left,” he begins. Now it is the time for a level-headed assessment of what this was really all about. Yes, he is an impressive speaker, who calmly delivered a quite capable speech in front of more than 200,000 cheering onlookers. Then again, in that speech he clung to what Seils calls “the front-line myth” that Americans seem to continue to hold about Berlin, but which is not true anymore at all. Berlin is not anymore any focal-point of ideological confrontation and by no means recognizes itself as such; rather, it’s the city of the Love Parade, for Heaven’s sake, which used to wind its crazy, techno-dancing way past the very Siegessäule before which Obama spoke! (Granted, the Love Parade now has started to be held elsewhere, after Berlin started to tire of dealing with the yearly hordes of people and their trash: for 2008 it just occurred last Saturday, 19 July, in the western German city of Dortmund.)

As you would expect, Seils does get past the hype to treat the unavoidable fact that, for all the greater cooperation and listening that an Obama administration will offer Europe, it also will demand more of its European allies and will be, with its wide smile, its seeming reasonableness, and thus its marked contrast to the widely-detested Bush regime, much harder to refuse. From the very structure of and statements eminating from this overseas trip, it is crystal-clear that at the top of that list of demands from our NATO allies will be a greater devotion of men and resources to Afghanistan to match what President Obama will be ready to commit. Seils’ article excels in that it depicts the problem that will cause rather starkly: involvement in Afghanistan – any involvement in all, much less the troops and money that are already going there – is widely unpopular in Germany. The meme of “why are we there in the first place?” is ever-present in public discussion. Still, again, that smiling President Obama will want even more. If only those predominantly youngsters clapping and cheering in front of the Senator’s speaker’s podium yesterday evening could realize that – they might change their tune!

He also reminds them – reminds all his readers – that, for all their rapture, it is not they or any Germans who will decide whether Barack Obama becomes the next US president, but rather American voters. And that race still seems very close.

Not to Gerhard Spörl of Der Spiegel, it seems, whose contribution to the post-Berlin analysis is No. 44 Has Spoken. Yeah, this one is pretty hagiographic – somewhat better than the “I met him in the gym!” Bild Zeitung piece, but not by much. Anyway, you can read it for yourself since Der Spiegel “put it on their English-language website (which, you’ll see there, has it’s own version of the George W. Bush’s-remaining-time-in-office countdown!).

Here, Have Some Bitter Truth

Columnist Thomas Hanke of the business newspaper Handelsblatt seemingly witnessed nothing but hard reality in Obama’s words, as he makes clear in his piece Cold Fervor. The references to the Berlin blockader were not just there to make everyone feel good; the decades-long confrontation in the city with the Soviets was brought up as an analogy to the severe tests which the West again faces today, especially in Afghanistan. In Hanke’s eyes, Obama in his speech was simply serving up the “bitter truth” that hard work and sacrifice lie ahead of America and its allies, and the replacement of Bush in the White House with another president is not going to change any of that. There can be no more illusions; Europeans will have to join the US in stepping up and taking responsibility for addressing the world’s problems as well.

Writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Yes He Can), Reymer Klüver both marvels at and dismisses Obama’s Berlin speech and his conduct on this overseas trip in general. On the one hand, the tour has been tremendously valuable to him in that it has demonstrated that he is definitely presidential material. The increasing influence of policy steps he has long advocated – both diplomatic discussions with Iran and a timetable for withdrawal of US troops from Iraq – has showcased his judgment.

Then again, the appearance in Berlin might have come at considerable ultimate cost to Germany – “Obama will be expensive for Germany,” Klüver writes. This is naturally because of the “shared sacrifices” that he made clear in his speech that he will be demanding of America’s allies. Still, one can still doubt how much of this will actually translate into concrete action when/if he becomes president. One must remember that 1) The real audience for the speech was American voters, not those who gathered in the Tiergarten to actually hear it, and 2) Obama has already displayed a capacity for abandoning positions he once held in the past (e.g. opposition to free trade/NAFTA), so that should be kept in mind.

Obama to Shove More Burdens Onto Allies?

Also on the Süddeutsche Zeitung site there is currently an interview, conducted by Thomas Denkler, with an “America-expert” from the German Society for External Politics, one Josef Braml (“Obama will not walk on water”). He makes some good points, such as linking Obama’s call for shared sacrifice with the orientation of his speech to the American electorate: what with the economic troubles in which the US now finds itself, interest has grown (especially among Democratic Party constituents) in cutting back on some of the money the country spends for its overseas engagements, by transferring some of that burden onto the allies, in order to have more financial resources to devote to problems at home. Also, even if he is elected president with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, Obama can still not expect easy going because of the ideological divisions that persist even within his own party – over free trade, for example, and questions of Homeland Security.

The Frankfurther Rundschau is also a serious German paper, from the country’s fifth-largest city and financial capital. In his analysis The World Becomes Young), FR columnist Harry Nutt has a curious take on Obama’s Berlin visit. He estimates that half of the 200,000 who gathered to hear the Senator live were under the age of 20. What is more, whether the Obama campaign cottoned on to this or not when they were persuaded to accept the Siegessäule as an alternate venue for the speech they wanted to schedule, that monument and the enormous circular square in which it is located (the Großer Stern) does not really anymore symbolize to Germans anything out of their history, presumably because anything it might have once symbolized was entirely discredited in the wake of the Second World War. Rather, (and as above), if you hit a German with Siegessäule! in a word-association test his response will probably be “Love Parade!”, and/or the “fan-miles” that were set up there on the boulevards between that monument and the Reichstag/Brandenburg Gate for swarms of football fans from all over the world during the World Cup in 2006, which Germany hosted, as well as the recent European Championship.

So the audience and the venue itself was all about young people, young culture; Nutt chides Obama that the numerous references he made to the Berlin Airlift were entirely without effect – that is just something out of some history book the members of the audience have been required to study. Still, quite an impressive mass of them showed up to hear the speech, and they proved loud and enthusiastic during it; what were they doing there, then? Firstly, they were looking for something as unlike as they could get to George W. Bush, something that could make them believe in politics again. But they were therefore also looking for an effective new politics, that can get results: “It is the hope for a Realpolitik, that nonetheless can be paired with Passion,” as Nutt puts it.

Amero-Centric

On the other hand, FR contributor Marcia Pally didn’t know about young-vs.-old, but all that she saw filling the square in front of Obama – presumably being present there herself – was Americans (Ich bin eine Berlinerin – Berlinerin merely meaning “female Berliner”). But that was somehow appropriate, anyway: after all, the speech was really meant for the American electorate back home, one big laundry-list of what Obama’s “change” is supposed to mean: putting in order the Iraq problem, as well as Afghanistan, Iran, Israel/Palestine, AIDS, climate change, the spread of nuclear weapons, the gulf between rich and poor, and the democratic deficit.

That’s quite a list. And Obama has also come to Europe to let the Europeans know that, if he is president, they will be listened to again. But why does Europe need the US for that? Most people, if they find that absolutely no one is listening to them, simply hire a psychiatrist. And why can’t Europe develop its own approaches to all those problems Obama is promising to bring “change” to? Those are good points, but especially surprising given their source, for Pally’s article itself had to be translated for publication in the FR, from English, for she is a professor who regularly teaches at NYU and a permanent Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, who has just been recently in Berlin as an academic fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Finally to the Financial Times Deutschland, and to a non-bylined editorial (thus representing the views of the editorial board collectively) that also looks ahead to the cold reality that is sure to come after the smiles, cheers and handshakes are long in the past: Hangover After the Intoxication. For what a President Obama has in mind for the world can be seen by the very itinerary of this overseas trip: first to Afghanistan and the Middle East, to take stock of the problems, and then to Europe, to seek help in their solutions. But it didn’t take this trip to enlighten German politicians about what President Obama would ask of them: it has been clear for some time that he would be after both a greater troop and financial commitment to Afghanistan (including changing their rules of engagement so that they are allowed to venture where things are actually dangerous, namely the South of the country), even as they seem to want to treat the American as some “cuddly stuffed animal,” that “says conciliatory phrases when you shake his hand.” But its the German voters, who don’t find it in their job-description to keep track of such things so closely, who could find themselves disappointed in the end, when “Obama’s new America strives after the old objectives” but turns out to be that much harder to say “no” to, precisely because of his great contrast with George W. Bush.

One interesting point the editors bring up: just as a notional Obama administration will be getting up and running in 2009, so will Germany enter its own campaign ahead of national elections in that year. Especially when Germans are running for re-election, they become very reluctant to being depicted as mere American “poodles,” so to say. (The word belongs to the British, not the Germans: it’s the idea I’m after here.) Those so eager to partake of the Obama-aura yeterday could well find themselves in the end rooting for John McCain – a figure much easier to say “no” to.

                          

You can certainly expect a broad run-down of tomorrow’s reactions in the German press (and, possibly, elsewhere in Europe) to the Senator’s speech and the event in general on this site from tomorrow – so stay tuned!

                          

Super Star!

Traveling with Obama, of course! And while the itinerary to the first part of his overseas trip – to the Middle East and South Asia – is somewhat unclear, deliberately for security reasons, we can be more sure about where he is going to be in Europe during the second half, and when. Everyone knows already that the high point – the only public address he is scheduled to give – will occur in Berlin next Thursday evening, 24 July. There’s already been somewhat of a controversy over where he is to be allowed to give that speech. That has now been resolved, but let’s take a look at what further details are available from local Berlin sources.

The German press is of course all over this event, but the best place to go is Der Tagesspiegel, which is the German capital’s leading quality general-interest newspaper. The paper set the mood for Obama’s visit with an apt analogy in the article it published (without by-line) on Saturday: European [Football] Championship Mood for Obama’s Speech. (It also provides with the article a neat Photoshopped picture envisioning what Barack Obama orating in the shadow of the Siegessäule, or “Victory Column,” will really look like.) Local readers can identify with that, since the European Football Championships, in which the German national team finished as runner-up to Spain, happened only last month. And indeed, just like happened then, a huge throng of people is expected and there will be giant video screens so everyone can see the “action,” together with the usual food- and drink-vendors. What has already been billed as Obama’s “significant speech” about US-German relations will take place on the east side of the Siegessäule – the better for cameras to be able to pick up the background image of the Brandenburg Gate in that direction, located only 2.5 km away down the broad Avenue of the 17th of June – and will take place in the open air. (Another case here of good planning, or perhaps luck: the Northern European weather has been atrocious over the past week and weekend, but forecasts assure us that proper hot and sunny summer weather should arrive in about two days’ time.) Unlike for the the European Championships, though, security measures will be somewhat tight: no bags allowed, and no banners. Then again, just like for the football event, no tickets will be required either – it’s come one, come all!

Give Us All the Details!

Further reporting comes in an accompanying Tagesspiegel article by Jörn Hasselmann, Rita Nikolow, and Christian van Lessen: Obama Plans a Walk through the City. How many people do city officials expect to be there for the speech? Could be up to a million, says city councilor Ephraim Gothe. About that “walk”: that is scheduled to happen after Obama first meets at noon next Thursday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, followed by a separate meeting with her foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier at 2:00 PM. (The Steinmeier meeting has to happen that way: the current German government is in fact a “grand coalition,” so that Merkel is head of one of the two largest parties (the CDU) while Steinmeier is head of the other (the SPD).) Maybe Obama’s meeting with Steinmeier won’t last that long, since he’ll be eager to go out and see a bit of the city. But what will he see? That has not been determined yet (at least publicly), but naturally the place or places need to have some sort of significance, preferably in an American context. So it could be Checkpoint Charlie, the site of the crossing-point through the Wall that was in the American sector; and/or it could be Tempelhof Airport, scheduled to close down next October because Berlin residents recently voted in a referendum not to pay for it anymore (it is too small an airport and too surrounded by city buildings), but at the same time the main (if not only) airport involved in the Berlin Airlift of 1948-49. And/or there is speculation that he might want to visit the special memorial to Berlin Wall victims at the Bernauer Strasse in the middle of the city, not very far in fact from where he then is to give his speech a few hours later, at 7:00 PM. (Public admitted to the grounds starting at 4:00 PM.) Afterwards, the Democratic candidate will presumably retire to his hotel to recover from a very busy day – and that will be the Hotel Continental on the Budapester Strasse, a five-star installation situated right at the southern edge of the big Tiergarten park, inside of which Obama is to give his speech. It’s only a kilometer away, down a wide park-lined avenue! If Obama turns out to make like Jimmy Carter at his 1977 inaugeration and eschew his motorcade in favor of walking back to his hotel amid the admiring throngs, then just remember – you heard it here first!

[Update: It turns out that Obama actually stayed at the Hotel Adlon Kempinski while in Berlin - truly the most prestigious address, situated as it is right by the Brandenburg Gate (and the new US Embassy). It's a bit further away from where he spoke in the Grosser Stern, but he still could have walked back to his hotel along a broad avenue (the Street of 17 June) with park on either side, along with mobs of spectators - but, of course, he didn't.]

Anticipation . . .

Finally, today’s Tagesspiegel continues its coverage with an article by Christian van Lessen entitled There’s No Holding It Back Any More. In that reporter’s eyes, it almost looks as if Obama intended to surprise everyone and fly into Berlin to give his speech today: the barriers are already up and the police are already massively patrolling the area in the Tiergarten around the Grosser Stern (“big star”) plaza where the Siegessäule is located. The tower-monument itself, however, is not yet closed, and in fact is doing great business, reports the lady manning (no pun intended) the cash register at the entrance. The stylish Café Victoria, along the side of the Grosser Stern, is also still open for business – what will be its fate on Thursday? No one knows yet. But one thing is for sure: Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit will definitely get his own face-time with the candidate, most likely by accompanying him on his “private walk” to whichever Berlin landmark he ultimately chooses to visit during that late-afternoon time-slot on Thursday. After all, Wowereit was ready from the beginning to give Obama anything he wanted for a speaking platform, including the Brandenburg Gate – it turned out not to be the latter mainly because of reservations coming from Angela Merkel over whether that really would be appropriate. Obama’s staff accommodated those in the end, even though ultimately it was Wowereit’s authority to decide where Obama could speak and not that of the Bundeskanzlerin. More to the point: it’s the Berlin city government which will pay the bills for all the stepped-up security and special infrastructure that will have go be laid on for the visit.

(A somewhat misguided article by Heidi Plougsgaard in the Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten – Is Obama Europe’s Poodle? – speculated that Obama’s campaign had actually chosen the Brandenburg Gate deliberately because they knew that it was an ultra-sensitive location for a speech and so was likely to draw objections from the German authorities. That way, there could be a whiff of confrontation and negotiation, and Obama could show the American electorate right off the bat that he has his own disagreements with the Europeans – i.e that he is not “in their pocket” or “their poodle,” something that supposedly was a mistake that John Kerry committed four years ago. I don’t really think so. If he actually were looking for a good old-fashioned dust-up with a European leader, he probably would not choose Angela Merkel, whose (very successful) negotiating approach within the EU and vis-à-foreign leaders generally is more like that of a kindly aunt than anything else. You would think that Nicolas Sarkozy would be a better candidate as someone to pick an argument with, so we’ll see, since Obama visits Paris right after Berlin – except that these two met each other (in the US, when Sarkozy was still France’s Interior Minister) two years ago and supposedly became best buddies.)

By the way, you might have seen the piece by Der Tagesspiegel’s Washington bureau chief, Christoph von Marschall, in yesterday’s Washington Post entitled “Snubbed by Obama,” complaining about the limited access the Obama campaign is granting to foreign-based journalists these days. As you would expect, the German newspaper posted the very same article on-line, on Saturday even – the German version, of course. But the piece’s title is half English: “Yes, he could – but he don’t [sic]: Obamas Umgang mit ausländischen Medien.” Isn’t that a scream? (The second half of the title means “Obama’s Relations with Foreign Media.”)

                          

(And then there are countries like the Netherlands who got this historical process backward, never truly having a king, being in fact renowned for making itself a republic at quite a precocious age, but then having a monarchy foisted onto the top of its political structure as late as the early 19th century. But don’t get me started here.)

My point, finally? It’s this: Do we know Queen Elizabeth’s political opinions? Or those of Queen Margrethe II of Denmark – or, indeed, of President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi of Italy? No, we do not, and we’re not supposed to, because it’s the role of the head of state to represent the country externally, and to represent the state to the people internally, and also to keep the country together during crises and the like. To fulfill this all-important role he or she really needs to be accepted as impartial, meaning not having in the past uttered divisive statements (like expressions of partisan opinion) whose memory could cause anyone meeting at the palace for crisis-talks to cop an uncooperative attitude.

NO SOFTIE, HE

But in Václav Klaus’ case, let’s get down to some specifics. Can we agree that, if you go visit some country as a national head of state, that you should really be diplomatic enough to forebear from criticizing projects near and dear to the host country’s government. I mean, we would also expect a visiting head of government (e.g. prime minister, as opposed to king/queen or ceremonial president) to repay the hospitality received by substantially toning-down any disagreements, and it’s the head of government whose job it is to get down into the nitty-gritty of international negotiations and making things happen.

But the Czech Republic’s President Klaus paid a visit to Berlin last week, and while he was there he didn’t hold back from making clear his dislike for a couple of things that his German hosts rather like. The leading Czech business newspaper, Hospodárské noviny, was right on it; as it reported, for one thing, Klaus Reject[ed] “Softening” of the Stability Pact. That’s the “Growth and Stability Pact” for the countries of the “euro-zone,” which specifies that you’re to keep your government budget deficit down below 3% of GDP. That Pact, and specifically the difficulties France and Germany – but other countries, too – have experienced in adhering to those requirements, has been a recurrent topic here at EuroSavant (like, here). France and Germany initially seemed to believe that they were allowed to take the Stability Pact as advisory, not binding, just because they were France and Germany, but the uproar that has arisen over their three years of over-three-percent budget deficits has at least pushed Germany to scramble for a more believable fig-leaf behind which to continue running those disallowed deficits. The German proposal is to “soften” the Pact by taking into account incriminating circumstances when judging excessive budget deficits, like underlying economic conditions of recession.

Václav Klaus doesn’t see much merit in that proposal, and said so when he met German president Horst Köhler in Berlin. In fact, he took a hard-core line: the (anonymous) HN author quotes him as saying “If there has to be a stability pact, then I would say that it’s really an unstable thing to have any budget deficit at all.” He went on to remind assembled reporters what the initial point was behind the Stability Pact: all these countries have agreed to use a common currency, the euro, and the whole thing is put under strain when any member-countries borrow excessively and so excessively put the common currency’s credibility at risk. But do those member-countries yet include the Czech Republic? Certainly not; among other reasons, because that country currently is running a budget deficit of 4.5% of GDP, and that’s only if you exclude some one-time costs related to privatization. What’s more, there’s little sign that it’s due to come down anytime soon. But that’s not Václav Klaus’ problem, anyway; it’s the problem of the prime minister, Stanislav Gross, to match incoming and outgoing government monies as best he can, and you can well imagine that Stanislav Gross might have a rather different opinion about the desirability of some “softening” of that Growth & Stability Pact. But in the meantime, the president can go ahead and strike his Thatcherite poses.

LONE PRESIDENTIAL REJECTIONIST

But that wasn’t even the most extreme such pose Klaus took up during his recent German trip. HN devotes a separate piece to cover his explicit rejection of the proposed EU constitution. Admittedly, his pronouncements on this subject were drawn forth by his being asked a question from the press. “I’m not critical [of the proposed constitution, meaning that he is not "just" critical of it]. I am 100-percent against it. I should make that clear.” And you surely know that the German government is especially interested in getting that constitution ratified, by all 25 member-states (fat chance!), having naturally been key in getting the compromises through at last June’s summit that finally produced agreement from all member-state representatives. Klaus took the opportunity to expand on his remarks, by reminding everyone of his views that the constitution, if enacted, would create out of the EU “a high-handed entity that would lead us to the extinguishing of our national democracies, sovereignties, and political independence.”

The notable thing about that is not really that Klaus once again expressed a rather too-sharp difference of opinion with that of his hosts than is really proper. No, not this time; the notable thing here is that Klaus is certainly the first head of state or government in the entire EU to come out so unequivocally against the proposed constitution. After all, it makes sense that no head of government has yet turned it down since, by and large, it was precisely every single one of those twenty-five EU heads of government who finally all agreed on the text last June. The main possibility for any exception would be for a change-of-government in a country in the meantime, and the new government having different-enough views on the country’s European policy to break with the previous government and reject the constitution, and this hasn’t happened. (It wasn’t Stanislav Gross who negotiated the constitution for the Czech Republic, it was Vladimir Spidla, who was since toppled from his post as prime minister, but Spidla and Gross are of the same CSSD party – more-or-less.)

On the other hand, you would also rather think that the proposed constitution would not be rejected by any of the EU heads of state, but for somewhat different reasons. And here the circle comes ’round again to the argument earlier in this entry: it’s not really the function of an EU head of state to reject the proposed constitution. Rather, it’s a task most countries’ political processes put in the hands of the head of government. (The exception here would be those rare cases of “presidential government,” where the given nation’s constitution confers considerable power – beyond the mere ceremonial – to the president as well as the prime minister; examples here are certainly France, perhaps Poland also.) Here, the head of state, whether president or monarch, is really not supposed to make these sort of waves when it comes to something as important as the future form of the EU, but rather should simply support what the elected government came up with.

This certainly also is true of the Czech Republic: if the deal on the Constitution was good enough for Spidla, and is good enough for Gross, then the president should at least be courteous enough to provide nothing more than a dignified silence on the issue. Making such pointed comments instead, especially when the guest of those who are sure to disagree, must be rather poor form. Ultimately, though, all that just has to do with outward appearances, rather than the true substance of what gets done and what does not. But the Czech president does have a limited but real influence on the latter world through his instrument of the veto – and if and when things come to the point in Prague where the proposed EU constitution has been approved by whatever standard way(s) (i.e. by referendum and/or approval by the Czech legislature) but then is blocked by a presidential veto, then this question of the relation of the president’s opinions to the fate of the state he heads will become interesting indeed.