Trans-Atlantic Relations

06/11/2008

European Media Will Miss 'Climate Killer'

With Bush Going, Germany Loses its Punching Bag

Germany never much liked George W. Bush. But he was able to unite Germans. Hating the US president was about the only thing the country could agree on in recent years.

One almost has to feel badly for German journalists, editorialists and political cartoonists. In just a few short months, Mr. Reliable will no longer be available for lampooning. The German media's greatest foil is riding into the sunset. Soon, George W. Bush, in Europe this week for his final visit as US President, will cease delivering a steady stream of material for headline after Bush-bashing headline.

It's too bad really. For much of the past eight years, anti-Bushism seemed to be one thing that almost everyone in Germany could agree on. On issue after issue, Bush seemed to find the position that was diametrically opposed to that which most Germans -- and a large majority of Europeans -- adhered to. And in doing so, Bush brought Germany together. Everyone -- the government in Berlin, the media and the populace -- agreed. The entire country has spent much of the past decade basking in the Bush-inspired knowledge that Germany was on the morally correct side of history in the past decade.

In honor of George W. Bush's final official visit to the country that loved to hate him, SPIEGEL ONLINE has put together a brief chronicle of Bush bashing, German style.

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when Bush-bashing became Germany's new national pasttime. Even during his campaign against Al Gore, George Bush Jr. was portrayed as the not especially bright heir to the Bush family throne. Political cartoons were suddenly full of cowboy hats and sheriff's stars.

Even the massive wave of sympathy for the United States following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 did little to improve Bush's image in Germany, and once it became apparent that the US president was intent on invading Iraq, it was open season.

Left-wing Die Tageszeitung was among the first to go on the offensive. A piece on Jan. 15, 2002 documented a mysterious "Pretzel Attack" against Bush. According to the tongue-in-cheek piece, "the pretzel was arrested by the Secret Service and taken to the prison camp Guantanamo in Cuba for interrogation." Another headline on the occasion read "Guten Appetit Mr. President."

Soon, though, the jokes were replaced by outright loathing as it became clear that the Bush administration was serious about going after Iraq and the rest of the Axis of Evil. As early as February 2002 -- over a year prior to the invasion of Iraq -- SPIEGEL ran its famous "Die Bush Krieger" (The Bush Warriors) cover, complete with Donald Rumsfeld dressed as Conan the Barbarian, Colin Powell as Batman, Condoleezza Rice as Xena the Warrior Princess, Dick Cheney as The Terminator and Bush himself as Rambo -- complete with a pretzel hanging around his neck.

"The Son Has Ruined What His Father Built"

Once Chancellor Gerhard Schröder made his opposition to the US invasion of Iraq the key component of his 2002 re-election campaign, the gates were thrown wide open. Bush was blasted for his "Uncouth Diplomacy;" he was accused of being a "Born Again Conservative;" references to the American "Crusader" became common fare; and even the center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung got in on the act, blaming Bush Jr. for "The New World Dis-Order" -- a piece that also had the subhead: "The son has ruined that which his father built."

The atmosphere became so poisoned in Germany that, in September 2002, then-Justice Minister Herta Däubler-Gmelin even decided it was ok to mention Bush and Hitler in the same sentence. "Bush just wants to distract from domestic difficulties," she said of the bellicose rhetoric coming out of the White House. "That is a popular method; Hitler did it too."

By the time 2004 rolled around, stories like the one in the Sächsiche Zeitung that January were hardly an anomaly. The piece, called "Aunt Berta Hates Bush," documented the paper's Washington correspondent coming back home for a visit. "Tell me," the writer quotes his cousin as saying, "how can you stand it in such a country? It's terrible. I could never live there as long as Bush is in office."

Not surprisingly, an alarming percentage of German youth in 2004 actually believed that the Bush administration was behind the 2001 terror attacks. And former German Research Minister Andreas von Bülow alleged in a best-selling 2003 book that the CIA was responsible for orchestrating 9/11.

German togetherness, however, has not just been furthered by the country's holier-than-thou pacifism relative to Bush's aggression. Rather, in a country that has been separating and recycling its trash for decades, the US president's refusal to admit that global warming might just be reality was simply too much. Type in the phrase "climate killer" into a German news archive and your browser is likely to crash. Green party politicians like to refer to Bush as an "eco-reactionary."

When Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans in 2005, most Germans were horrified and once again a wave of sympathy for the US swept over the country. But this time, the dash of schadenfreude was impossible to ignore. The then-German Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin set off a minor trans-Atlantic tiff by saying: "The American president has closed his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes such as Katrina -- in other words, disasters caused by a lack of climate protection measures -- can visit on his country."

The German media went even further. An opinion piece in Die Tageszeitung concluded: "I feel joy and sympathy concurrently. I am joyful at the moment that the most recent natural disaster didn't once again hit a poverty-stricken country, rather it struck the richest country in the world. I even see a kind of justice for that which the residents of this country have done to the residents of Iraq. I would, though, be more joyful if I knew that it was just the houses of Bush voters and military members that had been destroyed. I feel very sorry for all the others."

Even straightforward layoffs by US automaker General Motors was enough to fire up the anti-Bush passions of the German media. In 2004, when GM announced job cuts at Opel in Germany, the newsweekly Stern published a cover called "Wild West Methods." The image was a stars-and-stripes cowboy boot stomping down on Opel workers. It didn't take much to guess who was supposed to be wearing the boot.

With Bush now on his way out, however, it is hard to imagine how German media will fill the void. Politicians in Germany, for their part, are busy this week firing their parting shots. Bush, said old friend Trittin on the weekend, "definitely made the world worse."

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