origin of the legend that Kennedy flubbed "Ich bin ein Berliner"

Factual Questions
1

For no reason other than boredom, I’ve been thinking about the persistent urban legend that President Kennedy flubbed his famous line “Ich bin ein Berliner”. The story goes that Kennedy made a grammatical error so that when he meant to say “I am a Berliner” he really said “I am a jelly doughnut”. This is not true (cite1, cite2), but the idea will probably never die.

So, I’m wondering how and when this legend got started. Who can I blame for releasing this little bit of misinformation into the wild?

The earliest mention of the “jelly doughnut” meme I can find in print is a throwaway line in a paper appearing in a journal called the Journal of Asian-Pacific & world perspectives, Summer 1981. I found that on Google Scholar in snippet view, and I couldn’t see any citations in the paper. So I contacted one of the authors to ask if he could tell me what source, if any, he cited for the statement. The guy was nice enough to email me back and say that he hadn’t cited it. He said it was already a common idea at the time and that he should have documented it but didn’t. OK. He was a grad student; we all do crazy things in college.

So the birth of the idea is sometime before 1981. But, I can’t find any mention of it in the reports immediately after the June 26, 1963 speech. None of the newspapers or magazines I have access to mention it in their reports of the event. It was a widely covered speech, but no one mentioned jelly doughnuts, grammatical errors, or the like in print in 1963 as far as I can tell.

In July 1968, a Parade magazine article about the hazards of political translations spends several paragraphs discussing the Berlin speech in some detail. It talks about how careful Kennedy was and how well the line went over, but it never mentions the “jelly doughnut” thing. It holds up the Kennedy speech as an example of translation done well. From that I think it’s safe to say that the legend hadn’t caught on by 1968. Maybe it was out there gathering steam, but it probably wasn’t a terribly common meme if an article specifically about the problems of political translation failed to mention it altogether.

So, sometime between 1968 and 1981, the “jelly doughnut” idea seems to have taken root. I guess narrowing it down to a 13-year time window ain’t bad, but I’d love to find some reference to it from the 70’s. The author of the Journal of Asian-Pacific & world perspectives suggested it may have been in a public speaking textbook from that era, but I have yet to uncover it.

Anybody know anything more about the orgin of this legend? Can we get any more specific about its early life?

2

Here is a reference from 1976, though Google Books only displays a snippet that also suggests a Berliner is a hot dog as well as a donut.

3

Well, “I am a hot dog” seems more consistent with JFK.

4

And Ronald Reagan has supposedly said: “I am a Hamburger”.

If you ask me I’d say that someone with a rudimentary knowledge, but not working, of German made this up.

And as it happens, a Berliner is a “Berliner Pfannkuche” everywhere else in Germany but Berlin, where it’s simply called “Pfannkuche”.

5

I’m just guessing here, but I’d suspect the legend to originate in American misconceptions of German humorous reactions to the line. As the excellent snopes article (link in the OP) states, “Berliner” actually is the name for a jelly doughnut in parts of Germany (for instance where I’m from), but not in Berlin itself (there it’s a “Pfannkuchen”, so few people attending Kennedy’s speech would have made the connection). But I’m sure that many people in other parts of Germany instantly made jokes about the ambiguity of the phrase, without assuming that he actually flubbed it. Maybe these reactions led some American commentators into thinking that Kennedy made an actual grammatical error, and the legend was born.

6

The cites don’t do much other than admit that Kennedy did not make an error, just that the phrasing is ambiguous outside the Berlin area.

Consider - “I am a Danish” vs. “I am Danish” - only incorrect because the first case should be “I am a Dane”. The other example in the cite, “I am American” vs. “I am an American”, both are correct. Since his unterpreter who helped him with the speech was from Berliner, where the donuts are not called Berliners, the association may not have been as obvious to him.

The subtlies and nuances of “ein” vs. no “ein” are obviously close to English from the cites. So the ambiguity gives rise to alternate humourous interpretations, but Kennedy did not misspeak. I suspect anyone who knows what a Berliner is would make the association when in a humourous mood. I have seen the donuts sold as “Berliners” in some stores in the USA, so it’s not to far out to suggest it occurred to a lot of people on both sides of the pond fairly quickly that JFK had said something like “I am a Danish”. Americans, of course, not knowing the subtleties of German grammar, would probably fall easy prey to being told that “ein” was incorrect.

Oddly enough, “I am a Frankfurter” does NOT seem to work without the “a”. This has more to do with the subtleties of the place/object/resident nouns than anything else (Dane-Danish).

7

What about a gentleman from Hamburg?

8

:confused: Do you mean in English or in German? I’m asking because in German, “Ich bin Frankfurter”/“Ich bin ein Frankfurter” are both as correct as the variants of the “Berliner” Kennedy quote. I can’t think of any geographical place with which both these variants of phrasing wouldn’t work in German.

9

Yeah, I saw that one, but I hesitated to draw too much from it for two reasons: 1) the snippet inconveniently left off a lot fo the context, so I’m not sure who is doing the translating, or why the translator would make the connction to hot dogs (e.g., maybe this is one of those “funny answers to test quetions” or something); and 2) Google Books gets a little squirelly with dates when it comes to periodicals, so I couldn’t be sure what date that particular citation came from. With periodicals, Google Books sometimes groups all issues under the date of the first issue, and since snippet view hides the full page, you sometimes get duped. But, that is a really tempting clue. I’m hoping someone with access to back issues of Commonweal can chime in.

10

Paging samclem!

11

Isn’t this in one of John Le Carre’s Smiley spy novels from the '60s or early '70’s? (I think I remember it in a TV dramatization, though, so it may have been added later by the scriptwriter doing the adaptation. I am not sure when I saw the TV version.)

12

That’s a great thought. I don’t know for sure what the American miltary presence was in the early 60’s, but I believe there were an awful lot of American servicemen in Germany at the time. If so, the German jokes could easily have been picked up by American servicemen, who had an imperfect grasp of German, and who then brought the jokes home, where they morphed into the legend. That’s specualtion, of course, but I can see that happening.

13

Len Deighton uses it in Berlin Game in 1983. That might be what you’re thinking of. (But if it does appear in Le Carre, that would be a great find!) I think the Deighton novel, along with an editorial in the *New York Times *in 1988, really cemented the idea in popular culture

14

I suspect that this must have originated with an American whose experience with the German language was largely limited to high school German classes.

I can remember in my high school German class in which there was some emphasis given to the lesson that “Ich bin Amerikaner” was the correct way to put it and that “Ich bin ein Amerikaner” was incorrect.

To a large extent, this has to do with the necessities surrounding language instruction for complete beginners. It becomes too complicated if you try to work in every possible level of nuance or variation, so there is a need to set forth simple rules that for the most part will allow you to avoid errors for a chosen – slightly formalized – version of the language you are studying.

I think that’s what’s happening here. Somebody remembered a basic German language lesson and decided to apply that knowledge to a famous speech, and was pleased that he was able to make a joke of it and make a famous person the butt of the joke.

Language students do this kind of thing all the time, using their incomplete knowledge of a language to amuse themselves. In this case, though, someone took the joke out of the context of language instruction and decided to apply it to a real-life situation. And it caught on, to a large extent, I believe because Americans in general (1) are pretty naive about foreign languages and (2) appreciate this kind of joke against someone like Kennedy.

15

Curious, since I’d consider both correct when spoken by an American (The connotations in my mind would be Ich bin Amerikaner = I have the personal attribute of Americanness vs. Ich bin ein Amerikaner = I am a member of the group of Americans.) Which is why, as a non-American, if I wanted to express solidarity I’d say Ich bin ein Amerikaner, in the sense of figuratively standing by Americans.

16

I doubt that explanation. First, the legend is mostly unknown in Germany itself, where people who were present remember the speech (and the visit) as a very emotional moving moment.

I think it was borne more out of the very American desire to cut people down by flinging dirt at them that you see with all famous people in US society: somebody wants to find something to attach to that. Look at the rumors about children’s show host Mr. Roger or how MLK is not worthy of honoring because he cheated on his thesis (True, but not relevant).

17

Your teacher was quite wrong. There is no difference in German grammar along that line.

Of course, that whole rule-based-learning method in itself is idiotic and against all psychological/ pedagogic/ linguistic evidence on how people learn languages. Which is why it’s a bad idea to start with, and teaching general rules first, exceptions later, doesn’t save it.

Especially if they teach rules that are wrong.

Without checking for reality. Which raises the question, why did people feel it necessary to use a moment as special as this to mock and cut down a president as beloved and respected as JFK, using wrong facts? The psychology at play here is far more interesting than the wrong grammar alone.

18

Which is exactly the kind of subtlety that high school language classes would want to avoid. They want to teach you the form that is going to be correct in the most basic of circumstances.

19

This is pretty much what I’m interested in as well. Well, not the “why” so much (which is probably a better question for Great Debates), but the “when” and if possible “who”.

20

The psychology has little to do with mocking Kennedy. If conservatives were going to mock Kennedy, it wouldn’t be for the Berlin air lift.

In fact, the anecdote relies for its currency on Kennedy’s image as rich, glamorous, sophisticated, and popular and at ease in foreign countries. It’s of a piece with anecdotes such as “Einstein flunked out of school” and “Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team” (both stretchers), which are told not to mock Einstein and Jordan, but to emphasize that no one succeeds on every occasion.

The anecdote also plays on a basic American insecurity about mastering foreign cultures. Because of the size of the United States, many Americans haven’t traveled abroad and speak foreign languages poorly if at all. It’s easy to believe that translation is impossibly subtle and sophisticated and that minefields are everywhere. Translators and consultants who advise on conducting business abroad have a vested interest in promoting this belief, and loved the anecdote.

So, did you screw up while rapping with the headwaiter in Paris? Don’t feel bad. Even the glamorous and sophisticated JFK, backed by the full resources of the State Department, did the same. Get cut from your high school basketball team? Don’t feel bad. So did Jordan.