Berlin police say a window on the outside of the memorial has been broken, probably with a stone.

The window allows visitors to see inside the concrete memorial and view a video of a same-sex couple kissing

The memorial in Berlin’s Tiergarten park was inaugurated in May and suffered similar damage to the same window in August.

A protest held after that attack to denounce intolerance and homophobia drew more than 100 people including Berlin’s openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit.

Putting Obama on its cover, Der Spiegel declares, “Germany meets the SuperStar.”

Yesterday, Barack Obama drew a crowd of 200,000 at the Siegessäule (Victory Column) in Tiergarten, the Central Park of Berlin, a crowd which dwarfed even the 75,000 that the Democratic presidential candidate drew in Oregon before the primary there. “America has no better partner than Europe,” Obama told the enormous crowd, urging those in attendance to continue to participate in and support the war in Afghanistan, which is unpopular in Europe and especially in Germany.

Still only the junior senator from Illinois, Obama was greeted as one might a head of state, with adulation from the gathered masses and rave reviews from the European media. “His speech was a masterpiece in the art of political magic,” declared Der Spiegel, the leading German news magazine.

John McCain — who could only hope to draw a fraction of the 200,000 that his Democratic rival drew to the Tiergarten yesterday — was left carping about how inappropriate it was for a candidate not yet elected president to be giving speeches in European capitals. The putative Republican presidential nominee was reduced to a photo op in a restaurant in the German Village section of Columbus, Ohio. The senator from Arizona went to Schmidt’s Restaurant und Sausage Haus for what Schimidt’s calls “The Best of the Wurst!” — which some might say is an apt description of the Republican nominee himself.

“The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand,” Obama said, speaking not far from where the Berlin Wall once divided the city.

“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,” he said.

Obama said he was speaking as a citizen, not as a president, but the evening was awash in politics. His remarks inevitably invited comparison to historic speeches in the same city by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, and he borrowed rhetoric from his own appeals to campaign audiences in the likes of Berlin, N.H., when he addressed a crowd in one of the great cities of Europe.

“People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time,” he said.

Obama’s speech was the centerpiece of a fast-paced tour through Europe designed to reassure skeptical voters back home about his ability to lead the country and take a frayed cross-Atlantic alliance in a new direction after eight years of the Bush administration.

Republicans, chafing at the media attention Obama’s campaign-season trip has drawn, sought to stoke doubts abut his claims.

In Die Welt, the German publication, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Mich., said: “No one knows which Obama will show. Will it be the ideological, left-wing Democratic primary candidate who vowed to ‘end’ the war rather than win it, or the Democratic nominee who dismisses the progressing coalition victory as a ‘distraction’? Will it be the American populist who has told supporters in the United States that he will demand more from our allies in Europe and get it, or the liberal internationalist hell-bent on being liked in Europe’s salons?”

Obama met earlier in the day with German Chancellor Angela Merkel for a discussion that ranged across the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, climate change, energy issues and more.

Knots of bystanders waited along Obama’s motorcade route for him to pass. One man yelled out in English, “Yes, we can,” the senator’s campaign refrain, when he emerged from his car to enter his hotel.

Obama drew loud applause as he strode confidently across a large podium erected at the base of the Victory Column in Tiergarten Park in the heart of Berlin.

Police spokesman Bernhard Schodrowski said the speech drew more than 200,000 people, more than double the estimated 75,000 he drew in Oregon this spring.

He drew loud applause when he talked of a world without nuclear weapons and again when he called for steps to counter climate change.

Obama mentioned Iraq, a war he has opposed from the start, only in passing. But in discussing Afghanistan, he said, “no one welcomes war. … But my country and yours have a stake in seeing that NATO’s first mission beyond Europe’s borders is a success.”

He referred repeatedly to the Berlin airlift, launched by the Allies 60 years ago when the Russians sought to isolate the Western part of the city. If they had succeeded, he said, communism would have marched across Europe.

“Where the last war had ended, another World War could have easily begun,” the presidential candidate said.

Now, he said, the enemy is different but the need for an alliance is the same as the world stares down terrorism and the extremism that supports it. “This threat is real and we cannot shrink from our responsibility to combat it,” he said.

He said Europeans sometimes view America as “part of what has gone wrong in our world, rather than a force to help make it right …” And in America, “there are voices that deride and deny the importance of Europe’s role in our security and our future.”

He said both views miss the truth, “that Europeans today are bearing new burdens and taking more responsibility in critical parts of the world; and that just as American bases built in the last century still help to defend the security of this continent, so does our country still sacrifice greatly for freedom around the globe.”

In any event, he said, there will always be differences.

“But the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together. A change of leadership in Washington will not lift this burden. In this new century, Americans and Europeans alike will be required to do more, not less.”

Barack Obama with German chancellor Angela Merkel in front of the Reichstag in Berlin on July 24.

If Germans could vote for president of the United States, Barack Obama would win in a landslide. “He will be in Berlin this Thursday, when Germans will hail him as a magician with the ability to transform a gloomy world into a brighter place,” says Der Spiegel, the most respected news magazine in Germany. “Never before has there been so much excitement in Germany over the visit of a presumed US presidential candidate,” adds Spiegel. “Obama may be running for the White House, but judging by the commotion, one would think that he had already advanced two steps further and were the president of the world,” says Spiegel, which calls Obama ‘An American Idol in Germany.’

Of course, Barack Obama is still only the junior senator from Illinois and not yet even formally nominated as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, but “Mr. Obama may well be the first American presidential candidate to deliver a speech in Berlin,” as Jeff Zeleny notes in the New York Times politics blog, The Caucus.

The German enthusiasm for the Democratic presidential candidate is hardly surprising, given the low regard in which George W. Bush is held in Mitteleuropa. In Germany, Bush is reviled as an ideologue and an imperialist who launched a disastrous war in Iraq and plunged US relations with European allies to their lowest point in decades. With Republican presidential nominee John McCain viewed by Germans as offering more continuity than change, Germans are hoping his Democratic rival replaces the Dummkopf who has occupied the White House for nearly eight years now.

But downing some beer and bratwurst with Angela Merkel is not only good trans-Atlantic politics, it is also good politics for a presidential candidate such as Barack Obama, given the deep connections between Germany and America. “Often overlooked is just how German the United States really is,” says Nicholas Kulish on The Caucus page of the Times, pointing out that nearly 43 million Americans are of German descent, many of them in key battleground states in the Midwest, such as Wisconsin, which is 43% German American.

Munich’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung calls today ‘Obama-Day in Berlin.’ Deutschland has succumbed to Obama mania. The question is, will Mittelamerika demonstrate the same Obama mania in November…?