Obama’s Speech a Chance for Germany

Turkish-German writer and poet Zafer Senocak has a terrific piece in Die Welt on Barack Obama’s historic speech on race relations and why this speech is an opportunity for European and German politicians to change political discourse: Was unsere Politiker von Obama lernen können (What our politicians can learn from Obama).  Senocak writes movingly about America and what it has meant and still means to the imagination of Europeans and Turks. But the America of the imagination is not reality; it is a distortion that either idealizes or vilifies. Obama’s speech offers a corrective, and Senocak sees Obama addressing in his speech not just his fellow Americans, but the whole world:

"Obamas Rede rückt die Amerikabilder zurecht, nicht weil er sie meidet,
  sondern weil er sie in einen Kontext stellt, der wieder so etwas wie
  Wirklichkeit zu Tage fördert. Er drückt das Unvollkommene in der
  amerikanischen Demokratie aus, ohne es gegen die freiheitliche Idee der
  Gründerväter auszuspielen. Die persönliche Linse macht es möglich. Hier
  spricht nicht jemand über ein Land, sondern über sich selbst und sein Land.
  Diese Rede, die bei YouTube millionenfach angeklickt wurde, ist auch an
  Europa adressiert, an die ganze freie Welt an alle politisch denkenden und
  handelnden Menschen auf der Welt, die angesichts der gewaltigen
  Herausforderungen oftmals wie gelähmt erscheinen. Viele von ihnen sind nicht
  nur ratlos, sondern auch wortlos. Ihre Sprache ist verbraucht, denn sie
  kommt nicht aus dem Leben, sondern aus der Retorte der Bürokratie."

(Obama’s speech is a corrective to our images of America, not because he
avoids them, but he puts them in a context that is much closer to
reality. He is able to express the imperfections of American democracy,
without playing them against the ideas of freedom of the founding
fathers. The lens of his own life makes this possible. This is not just
someone speaking about his country: he is speaking about himself and
his country. This speech, which has been seen over a million times on
YouTube, is also addressed to Europe. It is addressed to the entire
free world, and all politically thinking and acting people in the
world, who often seem powerless when confronted with enormous
challenges. Many of them are not only clueless, but also speechless.
For they use a language that is stale; it does not spring from actual
life, but rather from a stilted bureaucracy.)

Senocak ends by pointing to the divide – "the wall" – that exists in Germany between Germans and the Turish, and Turkish-German population, which he sees as not unlike the divide between black and white in America. Obama’s speech offers a path towards bridging the divides – in Germany as well as America.

Read my translation of Senocak’s complete essay over at Watching America.