Der Spiegel: Obama’s speech tainted by Nazi History? [Updated]

You’re all familiar with the uproar in Germany over Obama’s original plan to speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate. In her fine essay, “The Adulation of a Leader: a Cautionary Tale,” Medusa noted that Obama was attempting “an ancestral hat trick,” evoking both Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy’s speeches at the site.

Well, Mr. Obama has been pushed down the road by German leadership to the Siegessäule monument, which Der Spiegel notes may be “contaminated by its Nazi past.”

In his Washington Post column, “The Audacity of Vanity,” Charles Krauthammer made the essential point about the “audacity” of Obama presuming he could speak at the Brandenburg Gate:

What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Ronald Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final “tear down this wall” liquidation. When President John F. Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.

Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush the elder — who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap — called “a Europe whole and free”?

Here’s more on what Der Spiegel is reporting about the new site:

Der Spiegel wonders: “Is Obama Speech Site Contaminated by Nazi Past?”

The German magazine writes:

The column originally stood in front of the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building, but was moved by Adolf Hitler to its current location in 1939 to make way for his planned transformation of Berlin into the Nazi capital “Germania.”

“The Siegessäule in Berlin was moved to where it is now by Adolf Hitler. He saw it as a symbol of German superiority and of the victorious wars against Denmark, Austria and France,” the deputy leader of the Free Democrats, Rainer Brüderle, told Bild am Sonntag. He raised the question as to “whether Barack Obama was advised correctly in his choice of the Siegessäule as the site to hold a speech on his vision for a more cooperative world.”

Andreas Schockenhoff of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats said, “the Siegessäule in Berlin is dedicated to a victory over neighbors who are today our European friends and allies. It is a problematic symbol.”

Mr. Obama is all too familiar with “problematic symbols”:

That grandiose symbol was “here today, gone tomorrow” after it became the subject of jokes throughout the media and on the Internet. So too is the Brandenburg Gate.

But now Mr. Obama has a new symbol to worry about: The Siegessäule column was seen by Adolph Hitler as a symbol of German superiority, and the move to its current location was part of Hitler’s scheme for the “transformation of Berlin into the Nazi capital ‘Germania’.”

Once again, the mantra — Location, location, location! — proves true.

UPDATE: Perhaps this new image will take Obama’s followers off the inconvenient truth:

Via Ben Smith’s Politico blog.