News Analysis: Bush sealed off from Germans in Mainz
By Richard Bernstein / New York Times
MAINZ, Germany - The main event of President Bush's visit here was a speech to an enthusiastically applauding audience of about 3,500 German citizens, gathered in a flag-bedraped hall in this town on the Rhine, thrilling to his declaration that Germany and America are more than "firm allies and friends," they are "partners in leadership."
And then, after the speech, Bush and the German chancellor took a boat trip on the river, just to enjoy each others' company.
That was 16 years ago, when George Herbert Walker Bush was president, Helmut Kohl the German chancellor, and Germany and the United States were united in the great cause of winning, or at least surviving, the cold war.
The current president, George W. Bush, who made a seven-hour stopover here Wednesday, had a very different sort of trip to Mainz. It was a very successful one, according to German and American officials; it helped a great deal to repair German-American relations damaged over the war in Iraq.
But there was something about the very physical setting that suggested how different and less automatically warm German-American relations remain, despite Bush's strenuous effort to improve them. Most conspicuously was the almost total lack of any contact between ordinary Germans and an American president visiting what could almost have been a stage setting, a German town with buildings but no people, a depopulated place, its shops and restaurants closed, and only police in green uniforms visible on the streets.
Of course, in the post-9/11 world, it is no longer possible for visiting American presidents to stand before throngs of German citizens, as John Kennedy did in 1963 when he made his famous "I am a Berliner" speech, or as Ronald Reagan did in 1987 when he declared, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
But Bush was so sealed off from Germans other than Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the two German journalists able to ask questions at a joint press conference that even a town meeting-type encounter with Mainz residents was scrubbed, out of the worry that the mood would be hostile. A meeting with a group of carefully screened Young Leaders was put in its place.
So the Bush-Schröder summit meeting went well, and both sides in this critical trans-Atlantic relationship were determined that it would go well. But the almost total isolation of Bush from Germans seemed a metaphor for how far apart Germans and Americans have drifted in the past couple of years, how wide the gap is.
"I think it was not only fine, but excellent," Karsten Voigt, a senior German Foreign Ministry official, said after Bush's meeting with Schröder. "Both sides obviously want to symbolize, by language, by rhetoric and by body language that German-American relations are good. When politicians do that, it's more than symbolic; it's also substance, because it gives a signal to public opinion that this is the way they want it to be in the future."
"I'm not saying that all the differences have been solved," Voigt said. "But the dialogue is no longer about whether a policy is right or wrong; it is now about developing the right strategy to deal with problems."
But what of the eerie depopulation of Mainz, and the cancellation of the town meeting? Voigt said that, aside from the post 9/11 security aspect to it, the absence of any connection between Bush and ordinary Germans illustrates what he called the skepticism toward Bush felt by a majority of Germans.
"It's simply a fact that the German government is moving in this direction," Voigt said, meaning toward warmer ties with the United States, "but that German population is skeptical."
To be sure, one of the purposes of Bush's visit was to erase the bad memories of those days two years ago when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called Europe "irrelevant," and Bush and Schröder were essentially not on speaking terms.
He may have succeeded; certainly, in calling Schröder "Gerhard" at their joint press conference and in thanking Germany, France and Britain for "taking the lead" on Iran - an initiative toward which the Bush White House was initially openly suspicious - Bush has altered the rhetoric and perhaps the mood.
It may in this sense be unfair to compare Mainz 2005 with other, showier American presidential visits to Germany, from Kennedy's in 1963 to Bill Clinton's memorable stroll through the Brandenburg Gate, marking the withdrawal of American troops from a reunified Berlin. Those were times when Germany lay exactly across history's main fault line, and, quite simply, it does not any more. |
