Did Kennedy say “I am a jelly doughnut” in Berlin?

The card in his pocket

On June 26, 1963, nearly two years after the Wall went up, John F. Kennedy spent a day in West Berlin. He looked over the Wall from a platform at the Brandenburg Gate and from another at Checkpoint Charlie. Then, in Mayor Willy Brandt’s office at Rathaus Schöneberg, the city hall, he asked for a few words of German. His interpreter, Robert Lochner, wrote them out, and Kennedy copied them the way they sounded to him.

That card still exists, with “Ish bin ein Bearleener” and, for the Latin, “Kiwis Romanus sum.” Outside, the square and every street around it were packed. Kennedy began with Rome:

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.’ I appreciate my interpreter translating my German!

Civis Romanus sum, “I am a Roman citizen,” was the claim that could protect a traveler anywhere in the ancient empire, as it protected the apostle Paul. Kennedy came back to the German at the very end:

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

Why his German was right

German usually drops the article when you say where you come from: a native says Ich bin Berliner, I am from Berlin. Kennedy was not claiming to be from Berlin. He was saying that he stood with the city as one of its people in spirit, and for that figurative sense ein Berliner, with the article, is good German. That is how the crowd took it. Nobody in the square laughed at his grammar; the only joke in that passage was at his own expense, when he thanked the interpreter for translating his German.

And the pastry? In much of Germany a jam-filled doughnut is indeed called a Berliner. In Berlin itself it is a Pfannkuchen, so the people listening had no doughnut in mind at all. Elsewhere, context does the work, just as nobody hears a man from Frankfurt calling himself a sausage when he says he is a Frankfurter.

Where the doughnut came from

The joke has no source in 1963. Its earliest known appearance is in Len Deighton’s spy novel Berlin Game, published in 1983, twenty years after the speech. Newspapers later repeated it as if it were fact, and it has been retold ever since, because it is funny and because few people outside Germany know what Berliners call their doughnuts.

Why Kennedy came to Berlin

The visit was a pledge. In 1961 the Western Allies had protested the Wall and done nothing more, and Brandt had drawn his own lesson: nobody was going to tear it down. Kennedy gave the crowd a refrain, “There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin,” and even said it once in German, Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen. He conceded that “democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in.”

East Berlin answered on a sign at the Brandenburg Gate, asking when the pledges to root out Nazism would be fulfilled in West Germany and West Berlin. Five months later Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and the square below the city hall now bears his name. Twenty-four years later another president came with a sharper sentence: see Who said “Tear down this wall”?