Fifty years ago today John F. Kennedy made one of the most memorable and important speeches in US Presidential History. \u00a0\u00a0In Berlin.<\/p>\n
And, dear reader, I was there.<\/p>\n
Odd, true, quaint, ridiculous, but my 20 year old self just happened to be in West Berlin when he made that historic address.<\/p>\n
I watched his cavalcade go by, \u00a0with Konrad Adenauer the West German Chancellor and Willy Brandt, the florid faced legendary mayor of West Germany, followed finally by the smiling JFK.<\/p>\n
How should I happen to be there?\u00a0\u00a0 Well it happened after this wise:<\/p>\n
I was at the end of my first year at Cambridge and my old school friend Alan Sinfield and I were hitch hiking around Germany for the second year running.<\/p>\n
The previous year\u2019s adventure had almost ended in disaster when, just outside\u00a0Stuttgart we were offered a ride by a flash geezer and his girlfriend in a fast Mercedes.\u00a0 Where were we going?\u00a0\u00a0 Munich.\u00a0\u00a0 Happy to take you there, climb in boys, this is my girlfriend Berthe.\u00a0 A tubby cheeked smiling Fraulein.\u00a0 Hello, how are you, throw your rucksacks in the trunk of the car and away we go, rollicking along the autobahn at high speed nach Munchen<\/span><\/i>.<\/p>\n Half way there we stopped for lunch and he paid for everything.\u00a0 He offered to show us the famous Hoffbrauhaus in Munich and take us to dinner there.\u00a0 Better yet he would put us all up at a Pensione and next day we would set off for Vienna.\u00a0\u00a0 Were we up for that?\u00a0\u00a0 Were we ever.\u00a0 Wow.\u00a0 This was the best lift in the world.<\/p>\n We checked into a delicious little Pensione, two adjacent double rooms, one for him and his girlfriend and one for us.\u00a0\u00a0 If we wouldn\u2019t mind waiting with his girlfriend while he popped out to make a dinner reservation and gas the car?\u00a0\u00a0 Of course not. Happy to.<\/p>\n After about an hour when he hadn\u2019t returned we began to worry.\u00a0\u00a0 Had something terrible happened?\u00a0\u00a0 Was he ok?\u00a0\u00a0 After two<\/i> hours we were very concerned.\u00a0 Our rucksacks were in the back of his car, passports, travelers checks, sleeping bags, clothing, everything we owned in the world.\u00a0\u00a0 We questioned his girlfriend.\u00a0 Where was he?\u00a0 <\/i>She crumbled into tears.\u00a0 She wasn\u2019t really his girlfriend. \u00a0She too had only just met him.\u00a0 He had picked her up in\u00a0Pforzheim just before us in Stuttgart.\u00a0 He had promised her the world and now done a runner.\u00a0 \u00a0With all our stuff.\u00a0 Oh shit.\u00a0 It was a Friday evening.\u00a0 We had no money.\u00a0 We had no passports.\u00a0 The British Embassy was closed.\u00a0 It wouldn\u2019t open until Monday.\u00a0 The Munich Police took a list of everything that was in the rucksacks.\u00a0 They weren\u2019t interested in us but they were quite interested in him. Turned out he was a known North German criminal from Hamburg on the run, fleeing southwards to Italy.<\/p>\n Broke and hungry we spent the weekend sleeping in the Munich train station before being issued with temporary passports and enough cash for us to hitch hike home.<\/p>\n Amazingly,\u00a0 eventually, the rucksacks were returned by the Munich police.\u00a0\u00a0 Ah that German efficiency\u2026<\/p>\n The second year (1963) we were better organized.\u00a0 Mark had turned up a distant relative in Berlin.\u00a0\u00a0 We would hitch hike through Belgium and into Germany and see if we could get to Berlin.\u00a0 We slept rough, sometimes in fields,\u00a0 often in unfinished building sites which offered us shelter from the elements.\u00a0 But hey it was June, the sun shone and we saw Heidelberg and visited a Schloss on the Rhine where we saw Charles Vth\u2019s signature, the autograph of a Holy Roman \u00a0Emperor.\u00a0 Nuremburg was quaint and the medieval city, which had been almost totally destroyed by the Allied Air forces, had been completely rebuilt.\u00a0 We visited the Albrecht Durer museum and of course stood on the spot where Hitler had given his largest rally.<\/p>\n In Nuremburg we learned that we would be forced to take a bus to Berlin.\u00a0 Berlin was an island, between us and it was East Germany.\u00a0 And hence the importance of the Kennedy visit.\u00a0 The East Germans had just built the wall separating East from West Berlin.\u00a0\u00a0 As they said, to keep the fascists out, but really, as everyone knew to keep their people in.<\/p>\n In 1948 Stalin had closed all borders into Berlin, and America and Britain had come to the rescue of the starving two million citizens with the Berlin Air Lift, an incredible exercise in supplying everything needed to stay alive by air for 18 months before the Russians gave in and re-opened the road and rail links to the West.<\/p>\n Now Kennedy was coming to pay his respects to the City which had stood for freedom against the Stalinist iron curtain.<\/p>\n And we were heading directly for it, without a clue.\u00a0 We had no idea.\u00a0\u00a0 We had been hitch hiking for about ten days.\u00a0\u00a0 No newspapers.\u00a0 No TV.\u00a0 No radio.\u00a0 We were free and on the road across Europe like Laurie Lee tra la la, tra la lee.<\/p>\n So, in total ignorance, we bought tickets for a bus ride from Nuremburg to Berlin.\u00a0 We were the only foreigners on the coach.\u00a0 Two young English boys.\u00a0\u00a0 At the Border Control into East Germany armed guards pulled us off the bus.\u00a0 What?\u00a0 Where<\/i> were we going?\u00a0 Why? \u00a0\u00a0Menacing men with red ribboned caps grilled us.\u00a0 Our fellow passengers stared mutely at us through the windows of the coach.\u00a0 There was a great deal of barbed wire.\u00a0 Would they let us in?\u00a0\u00a0 Would they let us out?\u00a0 \u00a0Surely we knew.\u00a0 What?\u00a0 Herr Ulbricht the great leader of East Germany was visiting East Berlin.\u00a0\u00a0 Oh.\u00a0 And also Kennedy was visiting West Berlin.\u00a0\u00a0 Oh.<\/p>\n I suppose we convinced them that two English spies would not be so dumb as to claim they didn\u2019t even know about these events making headlines round the world, for, finally, they let us back on the bus and we travelled the barbed wire fenced AutoRoute through the Democratic Socialist Republic of East Germany into the glittering city of Berlin.\u00a0 Which was en fete. \u00a0\u00a0Everyone was happy and excited. The great Kennedy was coming to visit.\u00a0 He would see for himself the Berlin wall.<\/p>\n Mark\u2019s distant relatives turned out to be a charming couple with young children in a nice house in a pleasant leafy suburb of Berlin.\u00a0 We were comfortable, fed and welcomed.\u00a0\u00a0 Next day we joined the throngs heading for the center of town.\u00a0\u00a0 And there we waited for a long time with a patient crowd with little German flags and little American flags until finally a huge cavalcade of cars came into view along the linden tree lined street.\u00a0 Big Cadillac\u2019s, buses packed with Press Corps, big wigs stared at us.\u00a0 Not since the Nazis had there been a parade this size.\u00a0 And then finally in an open necked car, the President himself, JFK, larger than life, with that huge head of hair and that glowing healthy color of wealthy men who spend time on Yachts.<\/p>\n Kennedy smiled the Kennedy smile and the crowd went wild and he waved at us and suddenly they were gone and we all went home happily to watch the rest of the show on TV.<\/p>\n \u201cIch bin ein Berliner.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n Eddie Izzard is wrong when he repeats the gaffe that it means \u201cI am a Doughnut\u201d in German.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s a good joke.\u00a0\u00a0 But it’s not true.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s perfectly good German.<\/p>\n The real point is that within half an hour the Berlin streets were filled with merchandise and glossy handouts of a smiling Kennedy with the legendary words underneath.\u00a0\u00a0 Somebody knew this was coming.<\/p>\n Next day we went through the Berlin wall via Checkpoint Charlie into the cheerless world of the workers\u2019 paradise.\u00a0 But that\u2019s another story.<\/p>\n On the way back we were once again pulled off the bus by East German guards and heavily grilled.\u00a0 They went through our stuff and confiscated every single picture of The Wall.\u00a0 Really?<\/i>\u00a0 You think in the West we don\u2019t know it\u2019s there?\u00a0\u00a0 Finally they let us go.\u00a0 Cheerio then.<\/p>\n But still, isn’t it odd to think that\u00a0I was there fifty years ago today, for a single moment in history in just the right place at just the right time.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fifty years ago today John F. Kennedy made one of the most memorable and important speeches in US Presidential History. \u00a0\u00a0In Berlin. And, dear reader, I was there. Odd, true, quaint, ridiculous, but my 20 year old self just happened to be in West Berlin when he made that historic address. I watched his cavalcade […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":473,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468\/revisions\/473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericidle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}