Saturday, May 11, 2013

The JFK 'doughnut' speech was at Town Hall

Correction. JFK made his famous speech not at the Berlin Wall but at Schöneberg Town Hall.

His script writer got it wrong: 'ich bin ein Berliner' means 'I am a doughnut'. What he should have said was: 'ich bin Berliner'.

But it didn't matter a whit - the line went global and it is now one of the world's most famous sentences.

The Berlin Wall was built in August 1961 with the aquiesence of the US government. It was breached in November 1989.

The Catholic Church was one of the few organisations, if not the only one, which spanned East and West Berlin.

The Bishop of Berlin lived in Bebel Platz in the East but the diocese included all of the city.

During the division of the city the Catholic 'territory' was a diocese. The bishop would have been one of the very few people in the church who would have been a cardinal bishop.

Today Berlin is an archdiocese with a cardinal archbishop.

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