Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" Speech (1963)
On June 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy stood at the Rudolph Wilde Platz in West Berlin — just a few hundred meters from the Berlin Wall — and delivered one of the most powerful speeches of the Cold War. Before a crowd of more than 400,000 West Berliners, he declared: "Ich bin ein Berliner" — "I am a Berliner" — expressing solidarity with a city that had been isolated, threatened, and walled off from its eastern half for nearly two years. The speech was electrifying. Kennedy had visited many places, but West Berlin, he said, was "the greatest city in the world."
Berlin Divided
When Kennedy spoke on June 26, 1963, the Berlin Wall had been standing for less than two years. The Wall was constructed beginning on August 13, 1961, when East Germany, with Soviet support, began sealing the border between East and West Berlin — first with barbed wire, then with concrete. The Wall was built to stop the hemorrhage of East German citizens fleeing to the West: before August 1961, more than 3.5 million East Germans had escaped through Berlin. The Wall's construction trapped millions in East Germany and cut families apart overnight. Since its construction, East German border guards had shot and killed dozens of people attempting to cross — a number that would eventually reach well over 100 by the time the Wall fell in 1989. Kennedy had been criticized for his initially muted response to the Wall's construction; his Berlin visit in 1963 was partly an effort to reaffirm American commitment to West Berlin's freedom after that criticism and after a series of Cold War crises that had shaken European confidence in American resolve.
Did You Know?
The popular legend that "Ich bin ein Berliner" was a gaffe — meaning "I am a jelly doughnut" rather than "I am a person from Berlin" — is largely a myth. In German, "Berliner" means both a person from Berlin and, in some regions, a type of filled doughnut. However, in the context of Kennedy's speech, the meaning was unambiguous, and no German speaker in the audience would have misunderstood it. West Berliners did not laugh; they cheered. Linguist Jürgen Eichhoff analyzed the phrase extensively in 1993 and concluded that Kennedy's phrasing was correct and natural in German. The jelly-doughnut story circulated for decades before it was debunked.
The Speech
Kennedy's speech on June 26 was one of the most rhetorically effective of his presidency. He had scribbled the German phrase phonetically on a notecard — "ish bin ein Bearleener" — during his flight to Berlin; an aide had provided the German text and pronunciation. The speech built toward its climax through a series of rhetorical challenges: "Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was 'civis Romanus sum' [I am a Roman citizen]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is 'Ich bin ein Berliner.'" He repeated the phrase twice more, and each time the crowd's roar became more overwhelming. Kennedy was visibly moved — reportedly more moved than by any audience he had ever addressed. After the speech, he told his aide Ted Sorensen that if he had said "Let me say the one thing I will always remember" at the beginning, it would have brought down the house. Sorensen noted that Kennedy was thinking out loud, not making a speech. The speech was carried live on West German radio and television. In East Berlin, it was suppressed.
Five Months Later
Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963 — five months and three days after his Berlin speech. The Berlin Wall he stood before endured for another 26 years; it fell on November 9, 1989, when East Germany's communist government collapsed under popular pressure and announced that its citizens could cross freely. The images of Berliners dancing atop the Wall, embracing strangers from the other side, and attacking the concrete with hammers are among the most joyful images of the twentieth century. The Rudolph Wilde Platz in West Berlin where Kennedy spoke was renamed John-F.-Kennedy-Platz after his assassination — a name it still bears today. The speech itself endures as a model of what words can accomplish in politics: it made an abstract Cold War commitment into something personal, immediate, and felt. As Kennedy said that day: "Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free."