Then he sang "Ein Berliner - Ich bin!"
As we all know if you want to say that you are from Berlin you don't say "Ich bin ein Berliner". That means you are a jam donut. If you want to say you are from Berlin in German you might say "Ich bin aus Berlin". However - if you are indeed a jam donut the former is fine.
Even though the idea of JFK proudly declaring that he's a jelly donut is an amazing and oft-repeated story, it appears to be an urban legend.
According to wiki:
"There is a widespread false belief that Kennedy made an embarrassing mistake by saying
Ich bin ein Berliner. By not leaving out the
indefinite article "ein," he supposedly changed the meaning of the sentence from the intended "I am a citizen of Berlin" to "I am a
Berliner" (a Berliner being a type of German pastry, similar to a jelly doughnut), amusing Germans throughout the city.
While the phrase "Ich bin ein Berliner" can be understood as having a double meaning, it is neither wrong to use it the way Kennedy did nor was it embarrassing.
[12] According to some grammar texts,
[13]the indefinite article can be omitted in German when speaking of an individual's profession or origin but is in any case used when speaking in a figurative sense.
[14][15]Furthermore, although the word "Berliner"
[11][16] has traditionally been used for a jelly doughnut in the north, west, and southwest of Germany, it was not used at the time in Berlin itself or the surrounding region, where the usual word is "
Pfannkuchen" (literally "pancake").
[17] Therefore, no Berliner would mistake
Berliner for a doughnut.
A further part of the misconception is that the audience to his speech laughed at his supposed error. They actually cheered and applauded both times the phrase was used. They laughed and cheered a few seconds after the first use of the phrase when Kennedy joked with the interpreter: "I appreciate my interpreter translating my German."
[18]
The misconception appears to have originated in
Len Deighton's 1983
spy novel Berlin Game, which contains the following passage, spoken by
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.
[19]
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:
Here is where President Kennedy announced,
Ich bin ein Berliner, and thereby amused the city's populace because in the local parlance a
Berliner is a doughnut.
[20]
Four years later, it found its way into a
New York Times op-ed:
It's worth recalling, again, President John F. Kennedy's use of a German phrase while standing before the Berlin Wall. It would be great, his wordsmiths thought, for him to declare himself a symbolic citizen of Berlin. Hence,
Ich bin ein Berliner. What they did not know, but could easily have found out, was that such citizens never refer to themselves as 'Berliners.' They reserve that term for a favorite confection often munched at breakfast. So, while they understood and appreciated the sentiments behind the President's impassioned declaration, the residents tittered among themselves when he exclaimed, literally, "I am a jelly-filled doughnut."
[21]
The doughnut misconception has since been repeated by media such as the BBC (by
Alistair Cooke in his
Letter from America program),
[22] The Guardian,
[23] MSNBC,
[24] CNN,
[25] Time magazine,
[26] and
The New York Times;
[8] mentioned in several books about Germany written by English-speaking authors, including
Norman Davies[27] and
Kenneth C. Davis;
[28] and used in the manual for the
Speech Synthesis Markup Language.
[29] It is also mentioned in
Robert Dallek's 2003 biography of Kennedy,
An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963.
[30]"
Another reference to this misconception appears in
David Foster Wallace's 1996
novel Infinite Jest, which contains the following passage:
Few foreigners realize that the German term Berliner is also the vulgate idiom for a common jelly doughnut, and thus that Kennedy's seminal 'Ich bin ein Berliner' was greeted by the Teutonic crowds with a delight only apparently political.
[31]"
Sorry to be a killjoy!
