Also today, June 26, but in 1963–mere months before he was shot dead in Dallas–President John F. Kennedy uttere the famous words "Ich bin ein Berliner."
By this he meant "I am a Berliner," and he said it as an expression of solidarity with the people of West Berlin, who were under dire threat from the Communist puppet state of East Germany and its Soviet masters.
The Berliners loved it. Wild cheers all round.
Now: Turns out that many folks today argue that Kennedy didn’t really say "I am a Berliner" in German. They claim that, instead, what he actually said was more like "I am a jelly donut." It wasn’t that he didn’t say the words "Ich bin ein Berliner" correctly. He said them right (albeit with his thick Boston accent). It’s that the words themselves are wrong.
According to this claim, in German the word "Berliner" is a reference to a kind of jelly donut. And it is. But not so much in Berlin, where Kennedy was speaking.
The "I am a jelly donut" thesis is reportedly an urban legend that started in the 1980s.
Not convinced? Well . . .
HERE’S AN ARTICLE FOR FURTHER CONSIDERATION.
As a former student of German, I can’t resist chiming in here. One of my German professors in college (he was from Berlin) explained it like this:
The corerct German phrase for “I am a Berliner” would be “Ich bin Berliner” (no article “ein” is used when making these kinds of identifications) just as the correct way to say “I am an American” would be “Ich bin Amerikaner” not “Ich bin ein Amerikaner.”
In using the “ein” it could be argued that someone might interpret what JFK said as I am a Berliner (which is the name of a popular pastry). In the words of my college professor, however…
“Did anyone who heard these words actually think that was what the president was saying? ABSOLUTELY NOT! We loved the man and his important message came through loud and clear!”
Kennedy had to leave out the “ein” to say what he wanted to say.
I’m confuzzled, sorry; the story is right how it was and I’m confused as to Jimmy’s point in bringing it up again.
Kennedy committed a stylistics faux pas and Germans will tell you that; they’ll say, “It was cute but/and we know what he really meant.” It’s not a shameful thing, it’s just something that sticks out in Germans’ minds about that speech.
When you want to say you’re from a region, or that you are something as an occupation, you leave out the article. “Ich bin Baeker” (I am baker). “Ich bin Clevelander” (I am Clevelander).
The “ein” in front of “Berliner” by default referred to the donut, not city-belonging. Just stylistics, and every German knows what a Berliner donut is.
To get even more pedantic: My understanding is that the full name of the pastry in question is actually Berliner Pfannkuchen, meaning that the “misinterpretation” is implied even less than the “legend” assumes. Further, the use of ein was apparently entirely acceptable for such phrases in the recent past.
So count me in with the debunkers. 😉
In German, Italian, French and Spanish, a man CORRECTLY identifies himself as being the citizen of a particular city WITHOUT using the indefinite article.
German: “Ich bin Berliner.” (Berlin)
Italian: “Sono romano.” (Rome)
French: ” Je suis parisien.” (Paris)
Spanish: “Soy madrileño.” (Madrid)
(Only German capitalizes citizenship.)
In all four of those languages, adding the indefinite article is not the correct way to identify oneself as a citizen of a place. The German “Ich bin ein Berliner” can indeed mean something OTHER THAN being a citizen of Berlin.
Another German example.
“Ich bin Hamburger.” This is the correct way to call oneself a citizen of Hamburg.
“Ich bin ein Hamburger.” This is the correct way to call oneself edible.
Fr. S. is right, as far as I know. I live in Germany and Kennedy’s blunder has come up a few times in conversations. It’s by no means an embarrassing blunder and they don’t ridicule Kennedy for it at all; it’s more like just a cute mistake that they remember fondly, if anything. The point that Kennedy was making was appreciated and wasn’t outshone by the imperfect stylistics. If there are parts of Germany where they actually would say, “Ich bin ein …” then I haven’t run into those people. Also, in pastry shops I’ve been in, Berliner are labeled “Berliner” without the Pfannkuchen. It’s not necessary–you probably call donuts “donuts”, not “donut pastries”. You might want to put the Pfannkuchen part in there for example, if you were doing a Google search for Berliner recipes and wanted to eliminate references to people from Berlin.
All rightie, I did some digging around on newsgroups and found out that there’s more to the stylistics than I thought, or the Germans I spoke to seemed to think! Check out this excerpt from the FAQ of soc.culture.german:
“Subject: 23.1 “I am a jelly doughnut”
————————————-
In his famous speech in Berlin, J. F. Kennedy, the president of
the United States, announced “Ich bin ein Berliner”.
This is frequently (and willfully?!) misconstrued as translating
to the English phrase “I am jelly doughnut”. While the German
word “Berliner” indeed also refers to a German bakery deli, and
a naive learner of the German language might be lead to believe
Kennedy only embarrassed himself, it was actually never conceived
in this meaning by the German audience.
For a scholarly discussion, see the following journal article:
Eichhoff, Juergen; Monatshefte, **85** no 1, (1993) p. 71.
“Ich bin ein Berliner”: A History and a Linguistic Clarification.
Summary: President John F. Kennedy’s well-known exclamation has been
often declared to be incorrect German, causing the President to be
totally misunderstood by his audience. It is shown here that and why
the statement, translated for Kennedy by a native speaker of German,
is the correct and the only correct way of expressing in German what the
President wanted to say. [10/95] ”
I also ran into a post that said something to the effect “Ich bin ein Berliner” needed the article “ein”, to express solidarity without saying that he actually was a native of Berlin (which obviously isn’t true). The native German who supposedly gave Kennedy those words was probably much more of a stickler for proper stylistics than the actual German audience.
Yet another post says that there are places in Germany where you would say, “I am a-er”. I’ve never run into these people but I tend to stick to my small area and don’t travel much outside of it except to visit relatives down South.
What seems to be the concensus is that Germans didn’t think about it too much, whether or not in retrospect it later hit them that Kennedy might have called himself a donut. In other words, it seems Americans are making a big deal out of it, not Germans. 😉
One thing I’ve learned from being here is that the German language is so complex, that natives often don’t speak textbook German correctly (nevermind all of the different dialects). Just as another example, they will admit that they make declension mistakes and not always being sure of themselves. When you listen to them, you don’t always hear the articles in a sentence clearly–they speed over them so fast that your ears aren’t quite sure whether you just heard “eine”, “einem”, “einen” and so on.
So this whole “Ich bin ein Berliner” quandary is likely to be pretty much a non-event.
Many people think President Kennedy called himself a jelly doughnut when he spoke in Berlin, but this is an urban legend, a hoax.
See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_berliner and
http://urbanlegends.about.com/cs/historical/a/jfk_berliner.htm
The earliest mention of the jelly doughnut story in print was in the early 1980s. In the 1983 spy novel “Berlin Game,” by Len Deighton, the character Bernard Samson is told that he is berlinerisch. His reply:
“‘Ich bin ein Berliner,’ I said. It was a joke. A Berliner is a doughnut. The day after President Kennedy made his famous proclamation, Berlin cartoonists had a field day with talking doughnuts.”
Len Deighton, Berlin Game, reprinted in Game, Set, Match (1986), page 85 .
“Berlin Game” was a work of fiction. In the preface to the reprint, Deighton notes that the novel is told in the highly subjective voice of the character of Bernard Samson, “who is inclined to complain and exaggerate so that we have to interpret the world around him.” The author wrote that “Readers who take Bernard’s words literally are missing a lot of the intended content.”
In a related novel, Deighton reminded his readers that the views of the characters were not necessarily those of the writer. “Winter” (1987), page preceding page 1, quoting James Jones: “…readers should remember that the opinions expressed by the characters are not necessarily those of the author…”
No doughnut cartoons have yet been found in the Berlin newspapers of the next day.
So my question is this: did Len originate this story?
Vince Treacy, Washington DC
vtreacy@msn.com
Hi folks!
I’m German and I just stumbled upon this “jelly donut”-thing. Never heard of this before and to me as a native speaker I can tell you it’s crap. JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” is a correct way of saying that he’s a citizen of Berlin.
Both sentences “Ich bin Berliner” and “Ich bin ein Berliner” are perfectly right in German. The first one might be more often used when you’re born in Berlin, while the second means more that you live in Berlin, but that’s debatable. But they’re both correct.
Of course the “Ich bin ein Berliner” also has the second meaning of “I’m a jelly donut” but when I say “I eat a hot dog” how many of you think I just got a Rottweiler from the oven? So no German thinks of jelly donuts when hearing that sentence.
Besides that, the jelly donut has a lot different names in the different German regions. In the south it’s Krapfen, in the north it’s in fact the Berliner but in Berlin itself nobody calls it Berliner but it’s Pfannkuchen.
So if JFK would have wanted to make clear that he’s a jelly donut, he should have said “Ich bin ein Pfannkuchen”.