Rathaus Schöneberg

Where JFK told 400,000 Berliners he was one of them — and changed the Cold War tone

The Rathaus Schöneberg, a stolid neoclassical town hall dating from 1914, would be unremarkable were it not for what happened in the square in front of it on 26 June 1963. John F. Kennedy stood on the steps and delivered one of the defining speeches of the Cold War to an estimated 400,000 people — the largest crowd ever to gather in West Berlin. The "Ich bin ein Berliner" declaration was not a policy announcement but an act of solidarity, made less than two years after the Wall went up, at a moment when many West Berliners feared the Western powers might negotiate away their city. It meant more than it said.

The tower of the Rathaus houses the Freedom Bell (Freiheitsglocke), a replica of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia given by the American people in 1950 as a symbol of solidarity with West Berlin. It still rings on significant occasions. A bronze plaque and small memorial near the entrance mark the Kennedy speech; the square was renamed John-F.-Kennedy-Platz. The hall itself is still in use as a government building — you can walk through the lobby but there is no formal exhibit inside.

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Kennedy's speechwriters had written "Ich bin ein Berliner" as a symbolic statement — a Berliner being a citizen of Berlin. What they had overlooked, or chose to ignore, is that a Berliner is also a type of jam doughnut sold across Germany. The supposed gaffe became a running joke, but it was largely invented: in context and in Berlin itself, no one thought for a moment Kennedy had called himself a pastry. The speechwriter Theodore Sorensen later admitted Kennedy had practised the line phonetically on a notepad before the speech, and the written version is preserved at the Kennedy Library in Boston.

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