I don’t know about the “cutting him down”… All of the times I’ve heard the legend, it’s sounded more like a “laughing with”, not a “laughing at”. That he made the flub doesn’t make him an idiot; it makes him human.
Interesting. The times I’ve run into it personally, it’s been a “fancy liberal thinks he’s so smart” kind of thing. The first time I recall hearing it was from my high school debate coach in the 80s, who got odd joy out of running down long-dead Democrats. Since I started researching it, I’ve see it presented both as a joke (a guy named Richard Lederer apparently puts it in every book he’s ever written) and as a petty criticism of a liberal icon.
There can be no doubt for any German with a rudimentary grasp of post-war history that this was one of the pivotal moments of that era, but please don’t let us Germans appear as the stereotypical humorless bunch. The ambiguity of the word “Berliner” is too obvious to not have been made fun of, without any disrespect to Kennedy in mind. I was born too late (1968) to be a witness, but I’m tempted to ask my parents, who were 23 and 27 then, if jokes of that kind made the round at the time. I’m quite sure there were.
There was a fellow on Usenet (remember Usenet?) who not only insisted it was TRUE and the ONLY POSSIBLE interpretation of what Kennedy said was that he was a jelly donut, and the people who were there immediately started howling with laughter, and Khrushchev was so emboldened by Kennedy’s obvious stupidity that he escalated the Cold War.
German speakers argued with him in vain; his high school German-English dictionary proved him right. People who linked to clips of the speech showing that people cheered, rather than jeered, were linking to edited versions that removed the derisive laughter. :rolleyes: So yes, it has definitely been used to bash Kennedy, and by extension those who are politically linked to Kennedy.
I’ve heard it used to bash Americans in general, not just Kennedy. ‘Americans are so clueless about the world they can’t even get one German line in a speech right.’
But then I went to Germany and mentioned this, and all the Germans there - Berliners and non-Berliners - just recalled it as a moving speech - and, significantly, they all recalled it; it was a big deal.
They were all born after the speech happened (this was in the early nineties) but, while they realised the ambiguity, didn’t think it was actually funny because, in context, nobody would ever actually mix the meanings up. It would be like someone in a dark blue uniform saying ‘I’m a copper’ and someone saying ‘haha! You obviously meant to say you’re a policeman but it could also mean that you’re a low-denomination coin! You fool!’
Part of it too, I think, comes from the excessive adoration brought on by his untimely demise; and then that of his brother. The Kennedy myth was over the top. After Chappaquaddick and Watergate, politics became nastier and a deep re-examination of our past idols happened. Kennedy then became a spoiled-rich screw-up whose testosterone almost blew up the world, with no respect for his marriage vows, consorted with mob molls, caused Monroe to kill herself, made brilliant decisions like Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, and conveniently died before the whole Vietnam problem came home to roost. The real progress on civil rights was done by a southern Texan after his death.
Of course, the truth lies somewhere in between. Really, JFK was not the second coming and not everything he touched turned golden. Being able to suggest his “greatest moment” was somehow flawed was just a way to add to the iconoclastic momentum.
I would hope not, since that was under Truman: Berlin Blockade - Wikipedia
Um, yeah, I knew that . . . see, I screw up, too, just like Einstein and Jordan and all those guys.
The story was given a shot in the arm in the 1980s when it was a Jeopardy clue along the lines of “a president who called himself a jelly doughnut”. I was taking an elective German course at the time and someone in the class asked the teacher about it.
They just repeated this myth on tonight’s episode of Pan Am, which took place during Kennedy’s trip to Berlin. :rolleyes:
Wasn’t there also a question in Trivial Pursuit about this story? I seem to remember hearing this story for the first time playing a trivia game in the 80s. If it wasn’t Trivial Pursuit, it might have been another trivia game (I had a whole bunch of electronic trivia games that I had forgotten about until I started writing this post).
My mother, who was a young woman during that time, bought a single LP with that speech on it, and back at that time, records were terrible expensive compared to the wages. (She still has it)
The building of the wall, and Kennedys visit, were quite important events even for the younger ones, and the clip of him saying “Ich bin ein Berliner” is shown at every history clip show of 20th century/ Berlin Wall/ German seperation etc. (Along with the photo of the young East German soldier jumping the barricade).
So even among the people who hadn’t been born then, the clip and the words are still well-known.
Aside: isn’t it strange to think that a whole generation now has grown up who doesn’t know the DDR and the wall from personal experience, only from stories by their elders? It feels so weird somehow.
I remember when I was a teen (13-15 years), I met an American exchange student, and while talking, he mentioned that the US symbol is the bald Eagle. At that point, I only knew that bald meant “having no hair”, not the secondary meaning of “having white feathers” for birds. So I laughed because I found it absurd to call an eagle, = bird, => covered in feathers “bald = having no hair”. (He wasn’t amused).
So lack of language proficiency from the people starting that legend seems to be the key.
Oh, and could you guys please tell all your German teachers to stop teaching that useless distinction in class? You’re not going to need to differentiate between “a/ein” and not in the first four years or the first week of speaking German, it’s advanced stuff and far too complicated to be taught by a rule.
It’s hard enough to persuade many of my fellow Americans that learning any language other than English has any value at all. You go try and tell them that they also have to be taught it correctly.
That doesn’t surprise me.
Well, if you’ve been following even the last couple of years of American political discourse, you might have noticed that “checking for reality” isn’t a high priority among a certain significant class of participants. Also, the mocking and cutting down part. Did you know that when Obama went to a big European meeting, he was checking out some chick’s ass?
Could a native German speaker confirm or refute the impression I get, which was that JFK’s pronunciation was truly dire?
He wrote the words down phonetically (here are his notes), and I remember it sounding more like “Each bean ein bear-leaner”. I’m at work at the moment so I can’t check out the audio…
Eh, he was from Boston. They can barely pronounce English. We’ll cut him a break on any additional languages. A for effort.
It’s always funny to hear people trying to speak a foreign language, and they sound exactly like they do when they speak English. You know how germans speak english with a german accent? Well, they also speak german with a german accent. So if you’re trying to say something in german, would it kill you to pretend to speak german with a german accent?
No, it wasn’t “dire”. And he did more than “just” write down the words phonetically - he practiced for 20 min. or more with his native-speaking translator.
Yes, he spoke with a noticeable American accent, but no, he was easily understandable. A slight accent when speaking a foreign language is inevitable for all foreigners save those who have a musical ear for tiniest differences in sound; those who take elaborate special accent lessons; and those who learned the foreign language as children.
It’s only a problem if the accent is so “thick” or the pronunciation so different (as often the case with Asian speakers) that the natives have trouble understanding the foreigner. Esp. those who are used to High German and not dialect as first language.
But since he talked to Berliners who have their own dialect, the latter was not a problem.