Berliners young and old will gather on Thursday to hear the voice of John F. Kennedy delivering his famous, "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech which electrified listeners at the height of the Cold War four decades ago.
Relations between Germany and the US may have soured in recent years, but Berliners have never forgotten Kennedy's rallying call from the steps of Schoeneberger Town Hall in West Berlin to a crowd of 400,000 cheering residents and to a world worried about the prospect of nuclear war.
So, on Thursday afternoon, the 40th anniversary of the speech, crowds will gather again in front of Shoeneberger Town Hall in re-unified Berlin. Local dignitaries will join pupils from John F. Kennedy School and eyewitnesses to the June 26, 1963, speech in commemorating the anniversary.
And at precisely 6:44pm on Thursday -- with Prussian precision, Berliners remember the exact time -- loudspeakers will reverberate with a recording of Kennedy's historic words, delivered in English except for that one or two stirring sentences in badly accented German which sent West Berliners into a frenzy of cheering.
Standing on that portico, the slanting rays of sunlight on a balmy mid-summer's evening dramatically lighting his facial features, the young president's Boston Irish voice rang out over the crowd and across the rooftops as if he were trying to breach the Berlin Wall itself, only a short distance to the east.
"I am proud to come to this city as the guest of your distinguished mayor, who has symbolized throughout the world the fighting spirit of West Berlin," Kennedy said with a nod to Willy Brandt, who would use his popularity as West Berlin mayor as a springboard to the chancellorship and to a Nobel Peace Prize.
"And I am proud to visit the Federal Republic with your distinguished chancellor who for so many years has committed Germany to democracy and freedom and progress," Kennedy said with a nod in the other direction to craggy-faced Konrad Adenauer, the aging West German leader who, ironically, would out-live the young American and walk up Pennsylvania Avenue only a few months later in his funeral procession.
The formalities out of the way, Kennedy got down to the meat of the speech. "There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world," he said. Then he paused.
"Let them come to Berlin," Kennedy bellowed. The crowd went wild.
"There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future." Another pause. "Let them come to Berlin."
He went on, "And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin."
Addressing voices of opportunism he added, "And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress."
Another pause before adding in German, "Lass' sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin."
With the crowd suitably energized, Kennedy settled into the stirring "freedom is indivisible" section of his speech, spelling out in terms anyone could understand how ludicrous, how inhumane, how intolerable the division of Berlin and of Germany truly was.
"When one man is enslaved, all are not free," he affirmed. "When all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe."
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