NEW YORK — Little more than three years after Barack Obama was greeted during his presidential campaign by an adoring and enormous crowd at Berlin, a leading newspaper in the German capital is criticizing the president as “overbearing, arrogant and absurd.”

The criticism is coming from the German daily Bild, which issued an editorial attacking Mr. Obama for his criticism of the failure of the Europeans to find a way out of their economic crisis. The criticism of Europe by Mr. Obama, and by his treasury secretary, Timothy Geitner, is perceived in Germany as blame-shifting for the economic troubles that have beset both Europe and America.

Nor is it simply Bild, the famed tabloid of the Axel Springer empire. A dispatch in the online edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel is quoting the center left Suddeutsche Zeitung as setting down Mr. Obama’s criticism of Europe as “simple electioneering,” even though the Suddeutsche Zeitung agrees with Mr. Obama on the need for Europe to improve its response to the crisis.

“A cheap search for a scapegoat” is how one of the leading papers, the Frankfurther Algemeiner Zietung, or FAZ, is quoted by Der Spiegel as characterizing Mr. Obama’s demarche, which came Monday at California, where Mr. Obama asserted, according to a dispatch of Reuters, that the Europeans, by failing to address their own problems, are “scaring the world.”

The financial newspaper Handelsblatt is editorializing that Mr. Obama’s remarks are not how friends deal with one another. “The fact that Barack Obama, who is a brilliant thinker, knows full well that things are much more complicated in reality does not help,” the Handelsblatt was quoted by Der Spiegel as writing. “Indeed, it does the opposite. In the desperate battle for his re-election he’d rather construct myths, such as claiming that the Europeans alone are responsible for the American mess. Not only is this fundamentally wrong, but — coming as it does from a friend — it’s downright pitiful and sad.”

It’s a sharp turn of fortune for a president who, in Mr. Obama, had been lofted to office in part on the perception that he would improve relations with a Europe that supposedly had been alienated by President George W. Bush. It may be that the acrimony will calm down if Europe is successful in putting together its bailout fund, to which Finland gave its approval today.

But it is a mark that in an era of fiat currencies, with no independent reference point by which economic policy markers can steer, blame shifting can become a game of one upsmanship in the maneuvering even among major nations — and deliver surprises that, as Mr. Obama’s is discovering, were little foreseen as recently as three years ago.