Ich bin ein Berliner
Speaking to an audience of 120,000 on the steps of Rathaus Schöneberg, Kennedy said, Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum ["I am a Roman citizen"].
In 2008, historian Andreas Daum provided a comprehensive explanation, based on archival sources and interviews with contemporaries and witnesses.
Initially governed in four sectors controlled by the four Allied powers (United States, United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union), tensions of the Cold War escalated until the Soviet forces implemented the Berlin Blockade of the city's western sectors, which the Western allies relieved with the dramatic airlift.
Over a period of months the wall was rebuilt using concrete, and buildings were demolished to create a "death zone" in view of East German guards armed with machine guns.
On July 25, 1961, Kennedy insisted in a presidential address that the U.S. would defend West Berlin, asserting its Four-Power rights, while making it clear that challenging the Soviet presence in Germany was not possible.
Plischke wrote a 1997 account[9] of visiting Kennedy at the White House weeks before the trip to help compose the speech and teach him the proper pronunciation; she also claims that the phrase had been translated stateside already by the translator scheduled to accompany him on the trip ("a rather unpleasant man who complained bitterly that he had had to interrupt his vacation just to watch the President’s mannerisms").
[10] Additionally, Ted Sorensen claimed in his memoir Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History (2008) to have had a hand in the speech, and said he had incorrectly inserted the word ein, incorrectly taking responsibility for the "jelly doughnut misconception", below,[11] a claim apparently supported by Berlin mayor Willy Brandt but dismissed by later scholars since the final typed version, which does not contain the words, is the last one Sorensen could have worked on.
[8] Robert Lochner claimed in his memoirs that Kennedy had asked him for a translation of "I am a Berliner", and that they practiced the phrase in Brandt's office.
[8] Daum credited the origin of the phrase Ich bin ein Berliner to Kennedy and his 1962 speech in New Orleans quoted above.
"[8] Behind the long table set up on the steps of the Rathaus Schöneberg were U.S. and German dignitaries, including Dean Rusk (Kennedy's Secretary of State), Lucius D. Clay (the former US administrator of Germany), Konrad Adenauer (the German chancellor), Willy Brandt, the Mayor of Berlin and Otto Bach (President of the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin).
Besides the typescript, Kennedy had a cue card on which he himself had written the phonetic spelling, and he surprised everyone by completely disregarding the speech, which had taken weeks to prepare.
According to Daum, after this first successful delivery, "Kennedy, who fiddles a bit with his suit jacket, is grinning like a boy who has just pulled off a coup.
"[13] While the immediate response from the West German population was positive, the Soviet authorities were less pleased with the combative Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen.
However, The New York Times' review of Deighton's novel appeared to treat Samson's remark as factual and added the detail that Kennedy's audience found his remark funny: Here is where President Kennedy announced, Ich bin ein Berliner, and thereby amused the city's populace because in the local parlance a Berliner is a doughnut.
[23]Four years later, it found its way into a New York Times op-ed:[24] It's worth recalling, again, President John F. Kennedy's use of a German phrase while standing before the Berlin Wall.
So, while they understood and appreciated the sentiments behind the President's impassioned declaration, the residents tittered among themselves when he exclaimed, literally, "I am a jelly-filled doughnut.
"[25]The doughnut misconception has since been repeated by media such as the BBC (by Alistair Cooke in his Letter from America program),[26] The Guardian,[27] MSNBC,[28] CNN,[29] Time magazine,[30] and The New York Times;[11] mentioned in several books about Germany written by English-speaking authors, including Norman Davies[31] and Kenneth C. Davis;[32] and used in the manual for the Speech Synthesis Markup Language.
[34] Another reference to this misconception appears in David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which contains the following passage: Few foreigners realize that the German term Berliner is also the vulgate idiom for a common jelly doughnut, and thus that Kennedy's seminal 'Ich bin ein Berliner' was greeted by the Teutonic crowds with a delight only apparently political.
The German version settled on a section title "misconception in the english-speaking world" (Missverständnis im englischsprachigen Raum) by January 2007.
[41] A reference to the myth in the national newspaper "Die Welt" as of July 2008 shows that the knowledge about the misconception in the US was well understood by then, referencing Wikipedia in the text.
