In fact, Kennedy's statement is both grammatically correct<4> and perfectly idiomatic, and cannot be misunderstood in context. The urban legend is not widely known within Germany!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner-----------------------------------
According to an urban legend, Kennedy allegedly made an embarrassing grammatical error by saying "Ich bin ein Berliner," referring to himself not as a citizen of Berlin, but as a common pastry<3>:
Kennedy should have said "Ich bin Berliner" to mean "I am a person from Berlin." By adding the indefinite article ein, his statement implied he was a non-human Berliner, thus "I am a jelly doughnut".
The legend seems to stem from a play on words with Berliner, the name of a doughnut variant filled with jam or plum sauce that is thought to have originated in Berlin.
In fact, Kennedy's statement is both grammatically correct<4> and perfectly idiomatic, and cannot be misunderstood in context. The urban legend is not widely known within Germany, where Kennedy's speech is considered a landmark in the country's postwar history.<5> The indefinite article ein can be and often is omitted when speaking of an individual's profession or residence but is necessary when speaking in a figurative sense as Kennedy did. Since the president was not literally from Berlin but only declaring his solidarity with its citizens, "Ich bin Berliner" would not have been correct.<6>
The origins of the legend are obscure. The Len Deighton spy novel Berlin Game, published in 1983, contains the following passage, spoken by narrator Bernard Samson:
'Ich bin ein Berliner,' I said. It was a joke. A Berliner is a doughnut. The day after President Kennedy made his famous proclamation, Berlin cartoonists had a field day with talking doughnuts.<7>
The New York Times review of Deighton's novel added the detail that Kennedy's audience found his remark funny:
Here is where President Kennedy announced, Ich bin ein Berliner, and thereby amused the city's populace because in the local parlance a Berliner is a doughnut.<8>
In 1988 William J. Miller wrote in an April 30 New York Times article:
It's worth recalling, again, President John F. Kennedy's use of a German phrase while standing before the Berlin Wall. It would be great, his wordsmiths thought, for him to declare himself a symbolic citizen of Berlin. Hence, Ich bin ein Berliner. What they did not know, but could easily have found out, was that such citizens never refer to themselves as "Berliners." They reserve that term for a favorite confection often munched at breakfast. So, while they understood and appreciated the sentiments behind the President's impassioned declaration, the residents tittered among themselves when he exclaimed, literally, "I am a jelly-filled doughnut."<9>
In fact, the opposite is true: The citizens of Berlin do refer to themselves as Berliner; what they do not refer to as Berliner are jelly doughnuts. While these are known as "Berliner" in other areas of Germany, they are simply called Pfannkuchen (pancakes) in and around Berlin.<10> Thus the merely theoretical ambiguity went unnoticed by Kennedy's audience, as it did in Germany at large. In sum, "Ich bin ein Berliner" was the appropriate way to express in German what Kennedy meant to say.<11>
Although it is false, the legend has since been repeated by reputable media, such as the BBC (by Alistair Cooke in his Letter from America program),<12> The Guardian,<13> MSNBC,<14> CNN,<15> Time magazine,<16> The New York Times<17>, and in several books about Germany written by English-speaking authors, including Norman Davies.<18>.
As for the creation of the speech, it had been reviewed by journalist Robert Lochner, who was educated in Germany, and had been practiced several times in front of numerous Germans, including Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt. The many video and audio recordings of the event show only enthusiastic applause following the statement; the only laughter occurred later, when Kennedy jokingly thanked his translator for his translation of Kennedy's German sentence into German.
During the speech Kennedy used the phrase twice, ending his speech on it. However, Kennedy did pronounce the sentence with his Boston accent, reading from his note "ish bin ein Bearleener," which he had written out in English phonetics.
According to another urban legend, then U. S. president Bill Clinton has referred to the phrase Ich bin ein Berliner and its urban legend when he had visited a pub in Cologne, Germany. When Clinton visited that city on 17 June 1999, he privately and without prior announcement went to a local pub, where he spent one and a half hours, having a typical local meal and chatting to the surprised visitors. Enjoying half a glass of the local beer, called Kölsch, he allegedly said: "Ich bin ein Kölsch". Unfortunately, in local dialect, the word Kölsch stands only for the beer.
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