Obama trumpets message of unity in Europe

Barack Obama was greeted by up to 200,000 yesterday at the Victory Column in Berlin. "I know my country has not perfected itself," he said in his speech. (jae c. hong/Associated Press)

BERLIN - Less than a mile from a point where the Berlin Wall once wound through this city's downtown, Senator Barack Obama yesterday extended his trademark message of unity to a global audience, inviting a large-scale collection of European supporters to join an era of liberal internationalism he said would be necessary to address the world's post-Cold War challenges.

"The greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another," Obama said. "The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down."

The Illinois Democrat spoke before an early-evening crowd that police estimated at more than 200,000, larger than any he has mustered in the United States. The overseas gathering in the midst of a presidential campaign was seemingly without precedent in American history.

Even though his rhetoric did not crest and fall as boldly as it does at domestic rallies, Obama earned some of his most robust applause with implicit critiques of policies associated with President Bush, including the war in Iraq and the use of torture against terrorism detainees.

"I know my country has not perfected itself," Obama said to an audience studded with American flags. "We've made our share of mistakes, and there are times when our actions around the world have not lived up to our best intentions."

Obama also beseeched allies to redouble their commitment to the NATO mission against the Taliban in Afghanistan, a position increasingly unpopular in some European capitals, saying "America cannot do this alone."

Yet the areas where Obama challenged European policy appeared to be dwarfed by the instances in which he identified with causes popular across the continent, such as reducing nuclear weapons and confronting the genocide in Darfur. Many in the crowd appeared to accept Obama as a welcome shift from Bush, and happily repeated his buzzwords "hope" and "change" in a variety of languages, often in English.

"What's a little bizarre is that at the moment in the United States when Obama has begun to lose his charisma, in Europe he still has the glamour," said Maxim Leo, 38, a Berlin newspaper reporter attending the speech as a spectator. "Here he is mythic."

The majestic staging of the speech did little to demythologize Obama, or to address a growing critique from political opponents and commentators that the cult of personality surrounding his campaign distracts from his ability to connect with individual voters.

Obama strode to a podium along a blue runway from the base of a 226-foot Victory Column erected to celebrate a 19th-century Prussian war triumph. He faced a crowd that stretched to the Brandenburg Gate, where John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan gave among their most celebrated speeches and where Obama had initially tried to hold the event.

His Republican rival, John McCain, chose yesterday to visit a German restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, in an effort to poke fun at Obama's cosmopolitan itinerary and message. He told reporters that he wants to speak in Berlin, too, but as president, not as a candidate. "While Barack Obama took a premature victory lap today in the heart of Berlin, proclaiming himself a 'citizen of the world,' John McCain continued to make his case to the American citizens who will decide this election," campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds added in a statement.

Obama's event was the only one open to the public on a weeklong international tour filled primarily with meetings with government officials and tours of local landmarks. In Berlin, a makeshift campaign apparatus was established to rouse a crowd - via the Internet and Bauhaus-styled postcards stacked at local cafes - to the site of the annual "Love Parade" techno dance and music festival. "He wanted to reach as many people as possible," said Linda Douglass, an Obama spokeswoman. "This whole campaign is about reaching people at the grass-roots level about the importance of making change from the ground up, and this is an example of that."

At the site of Checkpoint Charlie, where the Berlin Wall once separated east from west, two teenage women who station themselves there, dressed in Army uniforms to get curious tourists to take their photos - one euro per photo op - shared their spot with a stars-and-stripes, Obama "Yes, We Can" placard their boss had propped between them that morning. "Many people say Obama is very special, because he is young," said one of them, Julia Kühn, a 17-year-old student for whom playing soldier was a summer job.

Obama, who travels today to Paris and London, used his venue as a 20th-century relic to frame the 21st-century challenges - terrorism and global warming chief among them - that were the focus of his speech. After enduring the 1948 blockade and later division under Soviet rule, Obama said, "This city, of all cities, knows the dream of freedom."

The wall's collapse, and subsequent end of the Cold War, inaugurated an era of global connectivity that posed fresh problems that can be solved only through cooperation between countries and assertive international institutions, Obama said.

"As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya," said Obama, who talked earlier in the day with German Chancellor Angela Merkel about climate change and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The greatest evidence of those connections may have been the familiarity the throng demonstrated with the life of a charismatic foreign candidate for whom many of them would be unable to vote.

"I think the Germans pretty much love everything that comes from the United States," said Vanessa Koutsilis, a 38-year-old American resident of Germany who came to the rally with five students she teaches in an English class at the industrial manufacturer Siemens.

As they waited for Obama to arrive, Koutsilis and her students debated whether he would address the crowd in German, as Kennedy and Reagan had. They proposed translations for some of their favorite Obama phrases, which mostly included the words "hope" and "change."

"That's not a good idea to repeat old speeches," said Katherine Nispec, a controller at Siemens. "But I think he'll have good lines from his own speechwriters."

Sasha Issenberg can be reached at sissenberg@globe.com.