For Andreas Daum, John F. Kennedy's trip in June 1963 to West Germany and Berlin was “the greatest happening in German history prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall” (p. xvii). Despite Daum's hyperbole, his call to conceptualize diplomacy as cultural history is appealing, because it foregrounds the agency of everyday people. Politics, writes Daum, is a form of theater; and the emotions evoked among statesmen and crowds by political symbolism are a form of interactive power. By reinforcing the sense of transnational community, Kennedy's visit, argues Daum, was largely responsible for overcoming the crisis that marked German-American relations in the early 1960s.

The context was the superpowers' transition from confrontation to détente. With Kennedy's acceptance of the Berlin Wall, his downplaying of German reunification, his apparent willingness to move toward recognition of East Germany, and French President Charles De Gaulle's bid to step into the Bonn-Washington breach, transatlantic relations appeared severely unsettled. In August 1962 (the Wall's first anniversary), the shooting of a Wall-jumper had produced a popular outcry in Berlin against the haplessness of the western powers. In September, De Gaulle had made his own triumphant visit to West Germany (bypassing Berlin). The subsequent Cuban missile crisis both reinforced the western alliance and introduced new complications. Franco-German displeasure over the superpowers' post-Cuban efforts to ban atmospheric nuclear tests were matched by American displeasure over De Gaulle's veto of British membership in the Common Market and over the Élysée treaty, which signaled a special (and potentially nuclear) relationship between Paris and Bonn. The individual, partisan, and generational rivalry between the elderly Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (who deeply distrusted the Kennedy team's approach to détente) and West Berlin's Mayor Willy Brandt (whose own approach had begun to converge with that of the young American president) added to the charged situation.

Doing something to address these strains was the object of Kennedy's visit. The diplomatic venues, however, were city streets and television screens. Daum's concept of the “primacy of visibility” (p. 117) emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between the main actor and his audience. While Kennedy “embodied the duality of seeing and being seen” (p. 118), his audience's agency rested not just in responding to this stimulus but in fashioning it. The effectiveness of politics-as-theater was due in part to Kennedy's authenticity in conveying his “cathartic” shock (p. 175) in seeing the Wall. But much of the dramatic tension that made the visit so memorable lay in his audience's keen awareness of its own engagement in watching and tracking this presidential catharsis. For the Berliners, this visit was about the importance of being understood; and being understood required an assertive form of observation. This assertiveness, however, was not an assault, but an embrace; and among the things the audience tracked was its own satisfaction as it absorbed how fully the actor was fulfilling the audience's expectation that its embrace would be requited. In this way, the president's visit became an “emotional symbiosis” in which “the lead actor took his cue from the audience” as it “projected its hopes” onto him (pp. 176-177).

Crucial to this symbiosis was the common ground provided by the value-laden and historically steeled notion that Daum, following Ernest May and others, calls “America's Berlin.” Transcending and transmuting the city's pre-Nazi reputation for cutting-edge (“American”) modernity, the blockade and airlift of 1948/49 spawned a persistent American popular identification with Berliners' travails in the Cold War. To the American public, Berliners' experiences were (in May's words) “not the experiences of colonial subjects” but “the experiences of Americans” (p. 37). Likewise, in contrast to the Social Democratic party's original leadership in West Germany, the overwhelmingly Social Democratic electorate of West Berlin identified itself with America. Public pressure in Berlin succeeded in reconstituting the Americans' plans such that the president's motorcade spent the bulk of its time passing through (and thus seeing) those portions of the city whose postwar reconstruction was most influenced by American consumerist and civic values. The president's proclaimed identification with a city that had come to embody the potential universality of American ideals (Daum meticulously pieces together the origins of the famous phrase, “Ich bin ein Berliner”) thus matched his audience's insistence on conveying its own prideful role in the building of “America's Berlin.”

That symbolic politics matter will be no surprise to any German historian since George Mosse—even if, this time, the symbolism was explicitly transnational. Harder to assess is the diplomatic significance of the media-spectacular. Here, we come into the realm of the relative. Traditionally, diplomatic historians strive to ascertain the comparative significance of a range of factors by referring to the documentation of policymaking elites. Daum offers a start here by drawing conclusions regarding the immediate effects on Kennedy, Adenauer, and Brandt. But he does not overly concern himself with comparative causation. On one level, such an undertaking would miss his point, which has more to do with the mass basis of transnational bonding than with the short-term behavior of policymaking elites. But insofar as the point is that the latter is influenced by the former, then a close examination of the way Kennedy's visit did or did not echo in the later diplomatic documentation might make for an intriguing complementary study.

What Daum does do is to suggest the staying-power of the mythology that soon surrounded Kennedy's visit, especially as it was recast by Kennedy's shocking death. The context of intra-Alliance crisis was soon forgotten; what remained was the trip's emotional impact. As Daum notes, the emotional vein that was both revealed and deepened by Kennedy's trip reinforced the “legitimation” of “America's Berlin.” With the charismatic president's sudden death, commemorative efforts to preserve the impact of his visit contributed to a “routinization” (in Weberian terms) of the transnational relationship (p. 188). But the trip's emotional legacy lingered in a way that substance alone could neither outdo nor undo. The popular feeling or ideal or memory of belonging together became a tensile factor that diplomats would have to take into account in whatever came later. But it was not an unchangeable factor (as the street-politics of the younger generation would soon show), for mass politics are dynamic and not static.

Like any book, this one has a number of shortcomings. Factual slips include a picture caption that reverses the identities of Harry Truman and James Byrnes, and a transposed age-relationship between Brandt and Kennedy (who was actually four years younger)—a startling and pertinent error for a book that focuses on the theatricality of one event. Organizationally, Kennedy's day in Berlin is interrupted by an unsatisfying excursus on the contrast between the receptive and the critical street-politics of 1963 and 1968—a subject better treated at the book's end. From the Kaiserreich to the Cold War, Daum observes, Berlin's regimes have regulated the city's street-politics both fearfully and opportunistically; such regulation can prove delicate, for the crowd's “Eigensinn” can upset the desired balance between “control” and the appearance of “spontaneity” (pp. 167, 169). This is a striking point, but the implication of qualified continuity seems in greater need of conceptual and analytical differentiation. Conversely, Daum sometimes seems to be dressing familiar material in somewhat overly elaborate conceptual terms. On the whole, however, he is effective in suggesting how diplomatic history may be illuminated by attending to how cultural narratives are popularly and dynamically crafted.