"I am a Jelly Doughnut"

     The phrase above is an often quoted as being the translation of, "Ich bin ein Berliner", the famous phrase which Kennedy said during his speech on June 26, 1963 in Berlin. I had heard about this some time ago and recently did some digging into if this was true or not.

     

     The first place I stopped, and the first place many people stop when looking up info, was Wikipedia. On the page entry for the speech, there is a huge section dedicated to dealing with this misconception. According to the article, the reason seems to come from Kennedy's use of the word "ein", which he was correct in using since he was speaking in a figurative sense. The failure in translation seems to come from the fact that a "berliner" is a common name for a pastry outside of the city of Berlin. To quote the article:

     Whereas the citizens of Berlin do refer to themselves as Berliner, they generally do not refer to jelly doughnuts as Berliner. While these are known as Berliner Pfannkuchen (literally, "Berlin pancake"), commonly shortened to Berliner in other areas of Germany, they are simply called Pfannkuchen (pancakes) in and around Berlin.[12] According to the German History Museum, the theoretical ambiguity went unnoticed by Kennedy's audience.[13] As German professor Reinhold Aman writes, "Ich bin (ein) Berliner means 'I am a Berliner' or '...a male person/native of Berlin' and absolutely nothing else!...No intelligent native speaker of German tittered in Berlin when J.F.K. spoke, just as no native speaker of German, or one who does know this language would titter if someone said, Ich bin ein Wiener or Hamburger or Frankfurter."[14]

      Doing some further looking into on the "jelly doughnut" legend, I came across an article on About.com article, which quoted an older CNN article, that the man that who translated the phrase for JFK to use in his speech, was actually educated in Berlin and was fluent in German. Also, according to an article on Snopes.com, the speech was practiced in front of several German officials, including the mayor of Berlin himself! Also, that article points out that any laughter heard from around that point in the speech was from JFK making a quip thanking his translator for translating his German.

     While it would have been embarrassingly funny for one of our most memorable presidents to have called himself a "jelly doughnut" for all of history to remember, the truth is much more mundane than urban legend would have us believe. Which, the more I look into history seems often to be the case.

Sources:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner
2. http://urbanlegends.about.com/cs/historical/a/jfk_berliner_2.htm
3. http://www.snopes.com/language/misxlate/berliner.asp