Obama Expected to Speak in Berlin Next Thursday Crowd will be Enormous
Daily Kos has a story from Der Spiegle and the preparations for Senator Barack Obama’s speech this coming Thursday. Hundreds of thousands may attend.
Daily Kos, July 20th
Barack Obama’s planned campaign rally and speech in Berlin on Thursday is roiling the German political class, reports Der Spiegel (article in German). Authorities in Berlin are preparing for a million spectators, which would instantly make Obama’s speech the biggest political event in that country since unification in 1990. There are even plans to close down the street, a mile long, and replicate the setup during the World Cup with massive projection screens. Inevitably with a political earthquake of this magnitude, there’s some controversy stoked by conservatives.
Obama will be speaking on the eastern side of the Victory Column - the Siegessäule - a monument to the Prussian victories in the wars of unification that preceded Bismarck’s establishment of the Second Empire. The speech itself will be focused on the Trans-Atlantic relationship and give a preview of the foreign policy approaches of an Obama administration towards our NATO allies.
Team Obama picked what is arguably one of the most historically evocative spots in Berlin for his speech, and that history is not uniformly benign. Conservative members of the German parliament, the Bundestag, are pointing out, correctly, that the Victory Column was built in triumph over countries Germany defeated in its quest for unification; Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, France in 1871. But, as is often the case in Berlin, this terrain carries far more associations than that, some inspiring, some evil.
The column was inaugurated in 1873, somewhat less than two years after the proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. As you can see, the statue of Victoria on its summit points a laurel wreath into the distance; the direction it’s pointing to is towards Paris, a literal finger in the eye of France. It was built on Königsplatz, “King’s Square”, which later became Platz der Republik, “Square of the Republic”, then Adolf-Hitler-Platz, which needs no translation.
In 1938/1939, as part of the preparations for Hitler’s rebuilding of Berlin into Germania, the capital of the Fourth Reich, the column was moved from its original location across from the Reichstag - which was ordered to not exceed it in height, to demonstrate the respective societal rank of military power and popular democracy in Bismarck’s Germany - to its present location. The supervising architect of the move was one Albert Speer. During the move, the column was heightened, to give it more visual prominence at what was essentially the Western entrance to Berlin’s government quarter. Click here to read more at Daily Kos.