Ich bin ein Berliner

It is twenty past one on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth of June 1963, in the upstairs office of the mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, in the Schöneberg Rathaus, with the loudspeakers in the square outside playing Bach softly under a quarter of a mile of crowd that has been assembling since six in the morning. He is forty-six years old. He is John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, born at 83 Beals Street, Brookline, Massachusetts, the great-grandson of Patrick Kennedy of Dunganstown, County Wexford, who left Ireland in 1849 with thirty-eight shillings and a coffin-ship ticket and died of cholera in Boston nine years later.

On the desk in front of him is the typed speech card. The closing peroration has been redrafted three times in the last twelve hours. Sorensen and Bundy have, between them, taken out the line about all free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, then put it back, then proposed it as the closing, then proposed a closing in German, then dropped the German, then proposed it again. Lochner the German interpreter is in the office now with him. He has just spent ten minutes practising the phrase Ich bin ein Berliner with Kennedy, who has the right vowel on the Berliner and is uncertain about the bin.

Lochner says: the German is right, Mr President. The crowd will know what you mean. The German for civis Romanus sum is exactly Ich bin ein Berliner.

Kennedy says: write it on the card.

Lochner writes it phonetically on the card in pencil over Kennedy's typescript. Ish bin ine Bear-LEAN-er. Kennedy reads the line out loud, three times. He nods. He puts the card in his right inside pocket.

He thinks, looking out of the window over the empty stage on the square: the wall has been up for twenty-two months. The Soviets have not torn it down because they cannot afford to lose any more of their own people. The Soviets will not tear it down for a generation. The Soviets may not tear it down for forty years.

He thinks: I am here today because I lost the Bay of Pigs and I lost the Wall and the country needs to see the President in front of the wall in person. I am here today because we did not lose the missile crisis last October.

He thinks: I am about to deliver a speech to four hundred thousand Germans in their own city, a city that twenty years ago was the capital of the regime that the country I lead crossed an ocean to crush. The Germans will hear what I am about to say in two ways. They will hear it as the President of the United States. They will hear it as the man whose father was the ambassador to Britain in 1939, who is, by their own intelligence, on record as having said in 1940 that the British war effort was finished. The Germans will not have forgotten my father.

He thinks: the only way to hear what is said today as a German is to hear it in German. The closing has to be in German.

He thinks: I have practised the phrase ten times in this office. The vowels are not natural to me. The crowd will hear that they are not natural. The crowd will not care.

He goes out at half past one. He climbs the wooden stairs to the platform on the east side of the Rathaus. Brandt and Adenauer are with him. The crowd is, by the West Berlin police estimate, between three hundred and fifty thousand and four hundred and fifty thousand. The microphone is in front of him. He delivers the speech in nine minutes, in the cadenced rhythm Sorensen has built for him over five years of speeches. The peroration begins: two thousand years ago the proudest boast was civis Romanus sum. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner. The crowd takes thirty seconds to roar.

He delivers the rest of the speech with the Ich bin ein Berliner line repeated at the closing, in the form Lochner has written: and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words: Ich bin ein Berliner. The crowd, by every contemporary report, is unmanageable for several minutes after he leaves the platform. He stops at the foot of the wooden stairs in the lobby of the Rathaus, by Sorensen's later memoir, and says: we'll never have another day like this as long as we live. Sorensen agrees. They go back upstairs to write the next speech, which is the address at the Free University, in which he reverses ground entirely and presses for negotiation with the Soviets. The Free University speech is in many ways more substantive. The Schöneberg speech is the one that lasted.

The Berlin Wall stood for twenty-six years and four months after that morning. It came down on the night of the ninth of November 1989, by which time Kennedy had been dead for twenty-six years. The Schöneberg speech card, in his own hand with Lochner's pencilled phonetics over the typescript, is in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library at Boston. The square in front of the Rathaus is now Rudolph-Wilde-Platz, on which the City of Berlin in 1963 hung a bronze plaque, and on which, on the day after the President's death in November of the same year, the city renamed the square John-F.-Kennedy-Platz. The phrase Ich bin ein Berliner is on the plaque. The urban legend, that Kennedy had accidentally said I am a jelly-doughnut (because Berliner is also a name for a sweet pastry in some parts of Germany), is folklore; in Berlin itself, where the speech was given, the bread is not called Berliner, and no native of Berlin in the crowd of June 1963 mistook his meaning. The mistranslation legend was floated in the United States in the 1980s by a Penguin publication and is, by every German linguist who has been asked, not the case. The crowd took the line as it was meant. Tradition holds that there were Berliners in the square that morning whose grandparents had been at the Reichstagsbrand speeches of thirty years before, and who would tell their grandchildren, half a century later, that they had stood for one and they had stood for the other.