Ich Bin Een Berliner Speech Analysis

“Ich Bin Ein Berliner”, possibly John F. Kennedy’s best known words from his speech in Berlin in the summer of 1963. But his speech contained other memorable words that helped establish unity between West Germany and the United States during the Cold War. In 1961, the Berlin Wall was put up, separating West and East Berlin, Democratic and Communist Berlin, respectively. The enclosed citizens of West Berlin would no longer have access to East Germany and many lost hope of reuniting with family and friends on the other side. Then on June 26, 1963, U.S. president Kennedy gave a speech in Rudolph Wilde Platz to bring hope to the West Berliners and address communism of the East Germans. He tried to inspire Berliners to feel that the U.S. was on their side and the U.S.S.R. was not. In the speech, Kennedy uses rhetorical strategies of appeal to elitism, repetition, ethos, and pathos to create solidarity with the West Berliners, and to criticize the communist forces which put up the wall that divided their city. One of Kennedy’s purposes in the speech is to show solidarity with the people of Berlin and …show more content…
Near the beginning of the speech and at the end, Kennedy uses the phrase “Ich bin ein Berliner.” This, imploring acceptance by Kennedy connects him to the German people, by speaking to them in the language they best understand. Again, for Germans who must have felt like Americans were against everything German because of the Nazi rule of Germany, it must have felt good to hear an American president not only identify himself as a citizen of Berlin but to do it in the language of Berlin. Moreover, in the part of the speech where Kennedy is saying, “Let them come to Berlin,” there is one place where he says it in German, “Lass sie nach Berlin kommen.” Speaking to the Germans in their own language was an effective way to create a sense of solidarity, to let them know that America was on their