This case is symptomatic of the gradual deterioration of ties between Berlin and Washington since the end of the Cold War. "The lost friend" headline last week the influential weekly Der Spiegel. With one in a photo montage showing Obama in the shadow of Kennedy, the newspaper concerned. For the magazine, "Kennedy's visit to Berlin, it was almost ecstatic celebration of a protective alliance" between the U.S. and Germany. The journey of his successor, "no less charismatic" is more akin to "a simple family reunion," some seventy years after the end of World War II and more than twenty years after the fall of communism in Europe, Spiegel writes. In 2008, the Illinois senator had a triumph before 200. 000 young people gathered in the Tiergarten, the largest park in Berlin. Obama threw them that Europe and America "should remake the world once more." After his election, Merkel was bitten fingers refusing him the wings of the Brandenburg Gate, which marked the separation between the east and west of the city during the Cold War. On Wednesday, the U.S. president will deliver his speech to the well Brandenburg Gate, but the east side, in the confined and highly secure Pariser Platz, where 4,000 handpicked guests were invited space. Officially for security reasons. But in Berlin, it also suggests that the U.S. Administration dread unflattering comparisons with the crowd of 2008 in the Tiergarten, which adjoins the west side of the Brandenburg Gate. German diplomats complain that Obama, who has turned his priorities in Asia, has taken four and a half years to make the trip to Berlin. U.S. President Angela Merkel scolded repeatedly criticizing his lack of leadership in the European crisis and calling to do more to stimulate growth on the continent. The Chancellor hopes that the visit will provide him a bonus for the elections of 22 September. Merkel and Obama celebrate the initiative of free trade between the United States and Europe in the hope that it will bring growth, jobs and will give a new meaning to the transatlantic relationship.
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