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Kennedy left behind an adoring city that still remembers him with gruff affection. He created at least one extra, lasting legend. The story of the ‘jelly donut’. For many years, a story has been entertaining the world, to the effect that when the President uttered those hastily included words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ outside the Schöneberg Town Hall, he was committing a laughable grammatical faux pas. By inserting the indefinite article (‘ein’), he was calling himself not a citizen of Berlin, but a jelly donut (known throughout Germany – but not in the capital itself – as a ‘Berliner’). This led, it is said, to great hilarity among the listening crowd. Wonderful as this story is, it does not seem to be accurate. After all, when he was composing the phrase he had with him Rober Lochner and Theodore Sorensen, both of whom – especially Lochner – were fluent in German. The construction he used was an unusual one. Normally, a German simply describing where he comes from would say ‘Ich bin Berliner’ (or Dresdner or Münchner). But Kennedy was not actually from Berlin, as everyone knew full well. He was rather making a rhetorical flourish, including himself in the abstract club of being a Berliner in spirit. The insertion of ‘ein’ made this clear. One German author explains it so: an actor introducing himself at a party would simply announce, ‘Ich bin Schauspieler’; but if he was making a big issue of being an actor, claiming that his calling was relevant to some important matter, he might say: ‘Ich bin ein Schauspieler.’ The alleged amusement among the crowd seems to have been added afterwards as the story got around. The general view at the time held that the audience felt profoundly moved.
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