Ich bin ein Berliner (1963): Kennedy's Speech in West Berlin

Ich bin ein Berliner (“I am a Berliner”) is the most famous line of a speech that US President John F. Kennedy gave in West Berlin on 26 June 1963. Speaking from the town hall of Schöneberg to a vast crowd, less than two years after the construction of the Berlin Wall, he declared American solidarity with the people of the divided city. The short, largely improvised address became one of the defining speeches of the Cold War.

Background

Berlin lay deep inside East Germany but was divided among the four victorious powers of the Second World War. West Berlin, made up of the American, British and French sectors, was an island of Western influence. The Soviet blockade of 1948–1949 had been broken by the Berlin Airlift.

On 13 August 1961 East Germany sealed the border and began building the Wall. Many West Berliners felt that the Western powers had responded weakly. The Checkpoint Charlie standoff of October 1961 showed how tense the city remained. Kennedy’s visit in June 1963, part of a tour of West Germany and Europe, was meant to reassure Berliners that the United States would defend them.

The visit

Kennedy arrived in West Berlin on the morning of 26 June 1963, accompanied by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Mayor Willy Brandt. Huge crowds lined his route through the city. He visited the Brandenburg Gate area and Checkpoint Charlie, where he looked across the Wall into East Berlin from a viewing platform.

He then spoke in front of Rathaus Schöneberg, the seat of West Berlin’s government, on Rudolph-Wilde-Platz. Estimates of the crowd vary, but around 450,000 people are often cited for the square and nearby streets.

The speech

Kennedy’s prepared text had been drafted by his staff, but he departed from it substantially, adding sharper language after what he had seen at the Wall. He had practised the German phrases beforehand with the help of his interpreter, Robert H. Lochner, and wrote them on a card phonetically. The card, now preserved at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, spells the key phrase phonetically as “Ish bin ein Bearleener”. The whole address lasted only about ten minutes.

He opened by referring to the pride of ancient Romans in saying “civis Romanus sum” (I am a Roman citizen) and declared that in the free world the proudest boast was “Ich bin ein Berliner”. He then challenged those who claimed communism was the wave of the future, repeating the phrase “Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen” (“Let them come to Berlin”).

In one of the speech’s best-known passages, he said that freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but the West had never had to put up a wall to keep its people in. He ended by repeating that all free people, wherever they lived, were citizens of Berlin, and that he took pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner”. The crowd responded with prolonged cheering. Because the speech was broadcast live on radio and television, millions of Germans on both sides of the Wall could follow it.

The jelly doughnut myth

A popular story claims that Kennedy embarrassed himself because “ein Berliner” can also mean a jam-filled doughnut, so that he supposedly said “I am a doughnut”. This is a myth. In German the phrase was correct and natural in context, and his audience understood it exactly as intended. In Berlin itself the pastry is usually called a Pfannkuchen. The doughnut story spread widely only in the 1980s, long after the speech.

Aftermath and legacy

The speech was a triumph with the German public and strengthened ties between West Germany and the United States. Later the same day Kennedy gave a more measured address at the Free University of Berlin. Some of his advisers worried that the fiery tone of the Schöneberg speech might complicate efforts to ease tensions with the Soviet Union, which led to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty a few weeks later. A few days after Kennedy’s visit, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev travelled to East Berlin, and in a speech there on 2 July signalled his readiness to accept a limited ban on nuclear tests.

After Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas on 22 November 1963, Rudolph-Wilde-Platz was renamed John-F.-Kennedy-Platz. A plaque on the town hall commemorates the speech. Ronald Reagan’s 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate, with its call to “tear down this wall”, is often compared with it.

Timeline

• 1961, 13 August: East Germany begins building the Berlin Wall.
• 1963, 23 June: Kennedy arrives in West Germany at the start of his visit.
• 1963, 26 June, morning: Kennedy arrives in West Berlin and visits the Wall.
• 1963, 26 June, midday: Kennedy delivers the speech at Rathaus Schöneberg.
• 1963, 26 June, afternoon: Kennedy speaks at the Free University of Berlin and leaves for Ireland.
• 1963, 22 November: Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas.
• 1963, 25 November: The square in front of the town hall is renamed John-F.-Kennedy-Platz.

Why it matters

“Ich bin ein Berliner” turned a moment of Cold War diplomacy into a lasting symbol of Western solidarity with divided Berlin. The speech showed the power of a few well-chosen words in a foreign language and remains one of the most quoted political speeches of the twentieth century.