If you want, you can leaf through this book like a quarry for "spicy" or "delicate" anecdotes. How Michelle Obama leaves with her future husband a notion of "Les Misérables" because both find it terrible. How the couple is seeking artificial insemination or marriage counseling. How the First Lady talks to the Queen about oppressive shoes. What nightmares they were plaguing in the White House.

In fact, "Becoming", written by Michelle Obama herself (although assisted by a "team" of employees), is first and foremost exactly that: "My story." A worldwide print launch of three million copies and translations into 31 languages ​​certainly suggest that there is more to it than that. What exactly? Here it is worth comparing with other memoirs of female presidents.

In "Spoken From The Heart," Laura Bush once told of her childhood and raved about herself and her George W. as "two symbiotic souls." Politics was limited in these memories to the question of what face as a wife of the President for an electoral victory or defeat must be prepared. A book like a deep sigh.

photo gallery


11 pictures

Michelle Obama: The Eternal Charismatic

In "Living History," Hillary Clinton spared the audience too dirty details of married life, explained the origin of her rolling laughter, and made it all too clear that she did not want to "live" politics, but also make politics. A book like a zealous letter of application.

Michelle Obama follows this proven pattern in that the formative years of childhood occupy a large space - followed by the encounter with her husband, followed by years of hardship in the White House. Unlike Clinton or Bush, however, Obama writes in flashing vignettes, which could sometimes be taken from a novel by Michael Chabon or Donna Tartt.

In vivid pictures she tells her childhood - and thus of a threefold stigma. She comes from a working-class family in Chicago, she's a girl and she's black. When she talks about her brother's hypochondriacal quirks or his father's work ethic, she commutes between comedy and pathos with considerable lacunae.

A pop culture setting

Only when she believes to have achieved everything as a junior partner in a law firm, she meets Barack Obama. It begins a love story, which is also told as a love story, with a "peculiar heat" that "crawled up the spine".

In the second part you seem to be beginning to realize who she's dealing with. At night he lies awake, staring sadly at the ceiling. And Michelle, worried, asks in a whisper, "Hey, you over there, what are you thinking about?" Barack explains "a bit embarrassed": "Oh, I just had to think about the income differences."

Later, she will "look the other way" when her kiosk falls on the title of "Time Magazine" - with a portrait of her husband and the headline: "Why Barack Obama could be the next president." At least here you already suspect that "Becoming" is neither a sigh nor a letter of application. It may not be a literary event, but a pop culture setting. With force.

Not Barack Obama alone, but Michelle and Barack Obama have together in the spring of 2017 with the publishing giant Penguin Random House signed a contract that is estimated at a record amount of more than 60 million dollars. Barack Obama has already submitted two books and also succeeded as a writer. Of memories nothing less than an "American Classic" is expected. But it is Michelle Obama, so far only appeared in a book about the garden of the White House, which now sets the tone with her personal hero and Emanzipationsgeschichte.

Everything is going to be fine

And that sound makes the music. Indiscretion appears here as a refreshing openness, every ambition as fueled by idealism. The rise of the "power couple" in the White House as exactly the original American miracle, as that he is read anyway. Empowerment! "Becoming" is therefore less a reminder, it is a declaration of intent. It ends in major, on the note "Hope". The book suggests that the pair intends to continue to proliferate with its pound.

Anyway, the Obama deal with Netflix will produce series and documentaries worldwide in the future after the presidency. It is a clever and efficient way to shift charismatic power from the political to the pop cultural field - especially as Obama himself has helped to level the differences between these two areas.

Charisma put Obama in office, and charisma overlays any political assessment of his term until today. As the first black president, he has made an appearance not least through his sexy "swag", through his casual coolness and authenticity. He was the guy who held out the fist's "fist bump" to the cleaner. He was, along with his proud wife, the personified "Hope" poster and promise that pop and politics could enter into a prosperous liaison - even if it was only virtual and in affect.

Seen in this way, former TV star Donald Trump is not the opposite, but the most docile student of Barack Obama. Why appeal to reason, if it feels like it? So Trump plays his own tunes - on a keyboard that Obama first voted and then served so well.

So if you hit "Becoming" and look around, you feel like you're in a bad movie at the point where the big villain - as the Trump also explicitly appears in this book - has the upper hand at short notice. The core promise of both Obama is that the film continues. What is currently not good, that will be.