I hadn’t realized the coincidence until now, but June 26 is the anniversary of two extremely important Cold War events involving the German city of Berlin. In 1963, United States president John F. Kennedy told the people of West Berlin “Ich bin ein Berliner.” In English, he said, “I am also a citizen of Berlin.” Clearly, this wasn’t a literal truth. Kennedy was from Massachusetts. What was he talking about?
The city of Berlin was a critical location in the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. When World War 2 ended in 1945, the Allies (Britain, France, the USSR, and the US) partitioned Germany into four zones of occupation. Eventually, the Americans, British, and French combined their zones into one. The Soviets did not join. Already, they had resumed their historic mistrust of the intent of the capitalist nations of the world. (From their viewpoint, they had plenty of good reasons for doing so, but that’s a story for another blog post someday.)
The city of Berlin, Germany’s capital, was deep inside the Soviet zone. However, because it was the capital, the city became partitioned into four zones as well. These zones eventually became West Berlin (the Allies) and East Berlin (the USSR) just as Germany became East and West Germany. This led to the first crisis of the Cold War.
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Background to Ich Bin Ein Berliner – The Berlin Blockade
On June 24 of 1948, the USSR began the Berlin Blockade. It blocked all motor traffic into West Berlin and cut off supplies to its 2 million people, hoping to force the other allies to leave the whole city in Soviet hands. It was more a symbolic move than anything else (except, perhaps, to the suffering West Berliners), but in the Cold War, symbolism was critical. Or, at least, the people involved acted as though it was.
Harry Truman was the US president faced with this aggression by the USSR. He decided that, if the Soviets blocked all roads to Berlin, the answer was to bring supplies to West Berlin by air. Thus, on June 26 of 1948 the Berlin Airlift began. Planes landed in Berlin every four minutes at the height of the airlift, dropping 8,000 tons of supplies daily. The US kept this up for over a year, until September of 1949, forcing the USSR to cave while facing the ire of the international community.
This, then, is how we get to “Ich bin ein Berliner” in 1963. In 1961 the USSR built the Berlin Wall to separate East and West Berlin physically. Kennedy’s response was to visit West Berlin in 1963 to assure its people the US stood with them. It, too, was mostly a symbolic statement; the Cuban Missile Crisis had already demonstrated the lengths to which Kennedy would go to oppose the USSR. Yet, symbols are important. We still remember “Ich bin ein Berliner” today as an important stand for democracy at a time when world tensions were as high as they’d ever been.
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