Barack in Buchenwald

The American President is going to Europe. What is his notion of history? A Commentary.

Barack Obama in Buchenwald, Weimar, Dresden, and then in Normandy. This sounds odd, but one will just have to get used to it. But why, really? This is the “most European” U.S. president one can imagine, a left-wing liberal and advocate of the welfare state, someone the conservatives at home find un-American. But in the arena of European history – the Nazi crimes, the destruction of world wars, the division of the continent by communism, and the fall of communism in 1989 – this is not the story that links Obama and “his” America. The addresses of his family and his life history, which have become a symbol of a modern cosmopolitanism throughout the world, lie in Kenya, Indonesia, and Hawaii.

This can be expressed even more clearly. Barack Obama stands for what is new, and for the future: a 21st century president. He embodies the dream of jettisoning old burdens, of enlightenment and the modern age. It is not a question of where he finds historical role models like Lincoln, Martin Luther King, or Roosevelt, but rather a question of his role models for morality and progress. The Obama world is essentially not about history, far from it. When candidate Obama praised German-American friendship during the 1948 Berlin Airlift in his speech last year at Berlin’s Victory Column, it sounded like an echo from a distant world.

But this politician of today and tomorrow had prescribed for himself an almost overloaded crash course in history during his European trip on Friday and Saturday, a trip into the most impenetrable thickets of twentieth century European history. There is the memory of national socialism with the Buchenwald concentration camp. Obama’s great uncle was among the American soldiers who liberated the Ohrdruf concentration camp, which was part of the Buchenwald concentration camp network, near Weimar in the central German state of Thuringia. In Dresden, where the U.S. president met Angela Merkel, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 will be on display, but the air war which destroyed German cities will also be evident. Finally, in Normandy, there will be the commemoration of the 1944 Allied invasion that ushered in the end of Hitler’s domination of the continent. National socialism and communism, tyranny and liberation, war and victory and peace, and all of this in two days. Isn’t this a bit much?

From a global perspective, Europe is a side show for Barack Obama on this trip. His most important engagement was the speech he gave in Cairo on Thursday, one day before his arrival in Germany. This speech was America’s offer of reconciliation to the Arab and the Islamic world following years of conflict and resentment of George W. Bush. It was almost unavoidable that Obama’s policy of détente in dealing with Muslims unleashed anxiety and suspicion in Israel. The visit to a concentration camp memorial may demonstrate that the United States and its new president are not forgetting the Nazi crimes. The history of the extermination of the Jews and the precarious existence of the state of Israel, even today, remain in the conscience of Americans and their president. The Middle East is not a world into which one could smoothly move now in the twenty-first century because the past is never really gone. One experience still in store for Barack Obama is in dealing with the Middle Eastern factions who will not let go of the past.

George W. Bush functioned as if he were intoxicated by history, as if he were at a historical costume ball being shot at with live ammunition. In the conflict with the Muslim radicals and terrorists, whom he called “Islamofascists,” he saw the battle as a return to the world views and dictators of the twentieth century. He had a bust of Winston Churchill, the heroic British wartime Prime Minister, mounted in the Oval Office. The containment of the Islamic menace and the democratic transformation of the Middle East were the responsibility of his generation, like the Cold War was the responsibility of the previous generation. His presidency was like reruns of the heroic stories of his father’s and his grandfather’s generations.

This historical paranoia was a catastrophic misunderstanding, and Barack Obama is doing everything he can to tear down the historical and ideological aspects of today’s conflicts. This really is the point of his presidency’s foreign policy: the return to common sense and normalcy. He really has no use for comparisons with Churchill and parallels with Hitler. And now, during these days in Europe, this most unlikely major player, fresh to the world stage, has to be taking pleasure in being sensible enough to move beyond all of the twentieth century historical drama.