Word: berliner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...slogan you never hear at the Olympics is that with dreams come responsibilities. Offering an Olympic blessing to Adolf Hitler's Berlin in 1936 is a curse the International Olympic Committee has yet to shake off. And in the global neighborhood, any city's treatment of its local problems is suddenly a matter of everyone's concern. So evicting roughly 3 million of the capital's residents, as Beijing has done, while spending perhaps $200 billion on reconstructing the city (more than 300 times as much as it spent on rural health care for the entire nation in 2006) raises...
...Obama's people and Berlin authorities finally agreed to stage the speech instead in front of the Siegess?ule (victory column) monument - or "Goldelse" ("Goldlizzie"), as Berliners affectionately dub it because of a golden statue of the goddess of victory that crowns the monument. Built in the second half of the 19th century to commemorate Prussian victories against the French, the Danes and Austria, the column has been a backdrop for various mass events, such as the annual "Love Parade," a huge open-air techno party. The right location, some commentators only half-jokingly remarked, for a political rock star...
...media can barely contain their excitement. "Germany Meets the Superstar" read the front page of the weekly Der Spiegel in reference to a popular TV show, while the tabloid Bild called Obama "Berlin's New Kennedy!" and gushed, "It's like 1963," describing the presidential candidate as "just as young, sexy and charismatic" as John F. Kennedy. And that's before he's even set foot here...
...Although the Kennedy name is almost inevitably invoked whenever Barack Obama is mentioned in the German media, there is more to his popularity. The cover of the current issue of Zitty, a local Berlin magazine, shows a photo of Obama accompanied by the headline "I'm black and that's a good thing" - a reference to Berlin's openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, who strongly supported Obama's request to speak at the Brandenburg Gate and had once publicly announced, "I'm gay and that's a good thing." Jarring as that headline may be, it partly explains why Obama...
...Germans differentiate between America and the Bush Administration. They are not anti-American per se; on the contrary," says Andreas Etges, professor for North American studies at Free University Berlin and curator of a local museum focused on the Kennedys. "Obama, not only because of his skin color, for many, represents the other, better America...