Word: berlins
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...Berlin has not always been a friendly place for American politicians. Shortly after the Soviet Union began construction of the Berlin Wall, John F. Kennedy sent Vice President Lyndon Johnson to West Berlin. "They'll be a lot of shooting and I'll be in the middle of it," Johnson told an aide. "Why me?" Seven years later, West German leftists plotted to hurl pudding-filled balloons at Hubert Humphrey during his trip to the city; the police managed to disrupt the plan, but Humphrey was booed and heckled everywhere he went. And while history remembers Ronald Reagan's challenge...
...Barack Obama will surely receive a warmer reception in Berlin next week. But the mini-controversy that has surrounded his planned visit highlights the mix of admiration and suspicion with which Berliners view presidential pilgrimages to their city. The current source of dispute is Obama's purported desire to give a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate, the backdrop for Reagan's 1987 address. Through a spokesman, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she regards the possibility of Obama's speaking there "with a certain bewilderment ... No German politician would come up with the idea to do such...
...touchiness? Berlin has long been used by presidential image-makers as a political prop. During the Cold War, the city was the proving ground of the East-West conflict, the principal theater in the struggle between freedom and authoritarianism. Truman made the first presidential visit to postwar Berlin, driving through the ruins of the city in the wake of the Allied bombardment. The Allies' refusal to abandon the city to the Soviets, demonstrated most dramatically during the Berlin airlift of 1948, endeared a generation of Berliners to the U.S. When Kennedy arrived in Berlin in 1962, the city was gripped...
...Kennedy's speech was highly choreographed: in the book Kennedy in Berlin, Andreas W. Daum writes that the White House wanted Kennedy "to see, to be seen and to publicize this visibility as much as possible throughout the world for the benefit of those not participating." Reagan's visit in 1987 was a similar exercise in stagecraft, orchestrated by the Michael Deaver-trained White House Advance office. Early that year, U.S. officials in Berlin approached the WEST German authorities with the idea of Reagan's speaking in front of the Reichstag or the Brandenburg Gate, in view of the Wall...
...annual meeting in Quebec City this week, UNESCO's World Heritage Committee added another 27 sites to its already burgeoning list of places of "outstanding universal value." Now wooden churches in Slovakia, Weimar-era housing projects in Berlin, and Armenian monasteries in Iran have been granted the same hallowed status as the Statue of Liberty, Stonehenge, and the Temple of Angkor Wat. And why not? There are plenty of ways to define "a human masterpiece of creative genius," one of the several criteria for inclusion. But now that World Heritage Status has been bestowed on 878 sites, some wonder whether...