08/18/2025
So we know!
THE JFK GERMAN MYTH THAT REFUSES TO DIE
No. President Kennedy did NOT say he was a jelly-filled doughnut!
PHOTO: A Berliner Pfannkuchen with plum jam filling. German "Krapfen" do not look like American doughnuts, with a hole in the middle. Credit: Rainer Zenz, GFDL via Wikimedia
On 26 June 1963 US President John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States gave a nine-minute speech (video link below) to the citizens of Berlin in the square in front of the Schöneberg City Hall (Rathaus Schöneberg) in West Berlin. (The crowd was estimated at 120,000 people.) The purpose of Kennedy's speech that day was to encourage and support the citizens of Berlin, a city that had been split by the Berlin Wall for almost two years by then. The Cold War was well underway and West Berlin was one of its main hot spots.
At the time of Kennedy's speech no one listening to him thought that he had made a mistake in his German grammar – because he didn't. It was clear to his Berlin audience that by saying the German sentence, "Ich bin ein Berliner", the president was declaring that he was one of them, a fellow Berliner in spirit. No one laughed at what he said. The only laughter was a brief reaction to Kennedy's joking remark: "I appreciate my interpreter translating my German."
Two decades would pass before the jelly-doughnut urban legend arose, apparently quite by accident. Most historians cite a 1983 spy novel as the source of the JFK myth. BERLIN GAME by the British writer Len Deighton (b. 1929; also known for THE IPCRESS FILE and FUNERAL IN BERLIN) contains the following passage, spoken by the fictional character Bernard Samson:
"'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."
In Deighton's novel, Samson is an unreliable narrator, and his words cannot be taken at face value. However, The New York Times' review of Deighton's novel appeared to treat Samson's remark as factual and added the detail that Kennedy's audience found his remark funny. Later other "reliable sources", including the BBC, Time magazine, The Guardian, and CNN, repeated the doughnut misconception. The doughnut myth was virtually unknown in Germany until around the early 2000s via social media.
One single fact eliminates the possibility that Berliners listening to JFK's speech would have thought the president was talking about a doughnut: In the Berlin dialect, the word for doughnut is "Pfannkuchen", not "Berliner". The German word "Berliner" is used for doughnut in other parts of Germany, but not in Berlin itself. Another common word for doughnut, used mostly in southern Germany and Austria, is "Krapfen".
The final nail in the coffin for this myth is the fact that President Kennedy's use of "ein Berliner" was absolutely correct for what he wanted to express. A male person born and raised in Berlin would say in German: "Ich bin Berliner". (No "ein", the indefinite article.) By using the "ein" in his speech, JFK was being figurative ("I stand with you"), not literal ("I'm from here"). His German phrase had been approved by more than one German-speaker who knew the language well. And no one understood him to say he was a doughnut!
In his own handwriting, Kennedy had written down the German phrase (and two others) phonetically: "Ish bin ein Bear_lee_ner", a sentence he used twice in his speech. Here is the text of the parts of his speech in which he twice uttered the "Ich bin ein Berliner" phrase and a Latin one:
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!" ... 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!"
Watch JFK's entire 9-min. speech. There is enthusiastic cheering and applause, not laughter.
VIDEO + Info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner
