JFK: American President and Berliner

Every Saturday until August 18, Le Temps will publish an article about a great speaker of the 20th century using historical archives.

In five months, he will be shot and killed in Dallas. But for the moment, John Kennedy is in West Berlin. It is June 26, 1963. The American president is making a speech (which can be viewed in its entirety at http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3376), which has gone down in the history of the Cold War for its inexorable balance between the “free world” and the “communist world.” Furthermore, it is considered one of his best speeches; it of course involves “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Four German words that JFK proclaimed twice in the old capital of the Reich, next to Chancellor Adenauer and Mayor Willy Brandt. Four words spoken like the rest of his speech; carefully, slowly and without interruptions by a crowd that listened as if listening to God. 15 years to the day after the establishment of the Berlin Airlift, the Journal de Genève reported on it on page 3 the following day: “More than one million West Berliners reserved an enthusiastic welcome for the president who expressed hope that possibilities for reconciliation between East and West would come forth in the future.” The daily newspaper also noted that “from two or three buildings situated in the Eastern zone, some handkerchiefs were waving in the windows indicating that those who found themselves on the ‘other side’ were not unanimously in favor of their current leaders.”

On the same day, the Gazette de Lausanne put the story on its front page, as it was already a much more modern newspaper than its counterpart in Geneva. Its special envoy, Francois Landgraf — who died more than a year ago — wrote that the words of JFK “on the Wall and in the communist world were as hard as they could have been, for example when he said, ‘there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere, “we can work with the Communists.” Let them come to Berlin!’ And Kennedy repeats, in an approximated German, ‘Lass sie nach Berlin kommen!’” To finish he wrote, “The satisfaction of the crowd reached its height when Mr. Kennedy yelled ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’”

That iconic phrase had only one goal which was clearly carried out by the speaker: to demonstrate, based on the peace agreement which had established an American zone of occupation since the end of the war, the United States’ support of the inhabitants of West Germany. More specifically, to demonstrate the support of those in West Berlin, the portion of the city landlocked within the communist GDR territory and enclosed already for two years by the “wall of shame,” which today is no longer there.

Kennedy attached this linguistic borrowing to the roots of Western traditions, so that the message would carry. Let’s replay it: “2,000 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!’” Moreover, those words were almost immediately mythologized as The Gazette used them in a ferocious cartoon of a paunchy Nikita Khrushchev, the then head of the Soviet government. He was ridiculed in the newspaper which was quite imbued with Vaudian Liberalism, in the process of affirming to the citizens of East Berlin: “Ich bin auch ein Berliner” (“I am also a Berliner”) in a speech that was described as “dull.” As the daily newspaper from Lausanne puts it, “one K. followed the other, since Mr. Khrushchev advanced the date of his arrival in East Berlin.”

Of course, during this brief visit in West Berlin, the 35th American president saw the Wall. He gazed at it after looking “as if physically shocked,” says the Gazette; “Liberty certainly provides many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never needed to construct a wall in order to confine our population and stop them from leaving us. […] This wall is a clear and enduring exposition of all the failures of the communist system, before the eyes of the entire world. We cannot take the slightest satisfaction from this, because it represents an offense not only to history, but also to humanity.”

It was as globally offensive as would be the gunshot that would kill Kennedy a few months later. On November 23, 1964, on the first anniversary of the incident at Dealey Plaza, the Jounal de Geneve published a touching article from the Agence France-Press (AFP) that said, “A group of German secondary school students sent a bouquet of roses to Mrs. Kennedy to be placed on the president’s grave. ‘They are just flowers,’ writes one of the young Germans, ‘but they will show you that young Europeans will never forget the man who once claimed, “Ich bin ein Berliner.”‘”

More than 40 years later, a memorable editorial was published. It was written by Jean-Marie Colombani in Le Monde two days after September 11, and expressed the importance of this story that never ends. “In this tragic moment, when words don’t seem to be enough to express the shock that we feel, the first thing that that comes to mind is this: we are all American! We are all New Yorkers, as surely as Kennedy declared himself a Berliner in 1962.”