It was United States president John F Kennedy who proclaimed on 26 June 1963 to be “ein Berliner”.
He did so to show that the United States was in support of what then was the city of West Berlin under the control of the West-German government almost two years after the Berlin Wall was built to separate the city into two opposing ideological blocks.
It was the time of the Cold War, of East versus West, of capitalism versus communism, and democracy versus one-party rule. On our own continent, several anti-colonial wars of liberation (including our own) had just started.
I have always loved the city of Berlin, and although I didn’t have the opportunity to visit it during the Cold War, I have always found that part of world history extremely fascinating.
It must have been the spy thing. As a little boy, who would not want to be a spy? All the cloak and dagger stuff and cool toys like umbrellas that shoot real bullets. A career where everything is secret, and you can pretty much do what you want as long as you do it on behalf of the ‘good guys’. And when you get caught, all you had to do was dislodge the cyanide capsule embedded in one of your teeth, and you’d succumb in seconds and be spared a life of torture and agony.
Because spies knew how to torture, they devoted many hours to perfecting acts of inflicting pain.
By the time I first arrived in Berlin in 1992, the Cold War was over, and Germany unified. Or at least: They had started to erase pretty much most of what had been communist in former East Berlin. Large communist government buildings that looked like impersonal, communal outhouses were covered in plastic wrap with new architectural profiles painted on them in an attempt to entice people to get used to the fact that sometime soon a new building would arise in the place of the communist one.
And to drive the point home, they changed all street names in the eastern part and replaced them with names from the West. Of course no one cared to update the maps and getting around in the city as a visitor was an unconcealed nightmare. It was the time before smartphones and Google Maps.
Of the infamous Wall, only a small section remained – preserved as an open-air gallery of graffiti art. It is on this Wall that someone remarked: “Life as a hitch hiker is like a pubic hair on a public toilet brim; one time or another you get pissed off”.
Wise words, if you were ever a hitch hiker for a prolonged spell anywhere in the world, I assure you. I felt just like that many times since: Fed up enough to pack it all in and go home.
I went to all the usual and unusual historic sites and took it all in. Checkpoint Charlie was a highlight of course and I went there three times, because I did not want to miss anything.
I quickly realised that being a spy was nasty business and not something young boys should be romanticising. But that is part of growing up, I guess. Nothing is ever what it seems to be, and dreams of doing good in a world filled with evil disappear faster than a lonely clown on a motorised unicycle.
I also visited beer halls and pretensions, avant-garde art clubs. They had kicked all the jazz clubs out from Oranienburger Strasse and replaced them with industrial actors performing conceptual nonsense.
But the one thing I could not find in Berlin was the Berliner – the yeast-proved, enriched dough-based, deep-fried pastry filled with sweet jam and covered in castor sugar or sugar glaze; much like a doughnut but without the hole in the middle.
I then learnt that being called a ‘Berliner’ does not necessarily mean that you are from Berlin; instead it could mean that you are a deep-fried, yeast-proven doughnut filled with jam and covered in sugar.
Standing around with a head filled with strawberry jam, maybe this is what Kennedy meant when he said “Ich bin ein Berliner”.
Maybe, just before his speech, he visited one of those famous city bakeries, feeling a little peckish and asking for “ein Berliner, bitte”.
And maybe the hot-blooded, fiery baker upended a bowl of strawberry jam onto his head whilst shouting: “Da ist kein Berliner in Berlin! Are you stupid or something?”
And with no time to go back to the hotel to wash or change, he decided to make most of the jam on his head, and prove the baker wrong.
For that day, and that day only, there was “ein Berliner” in Berlin. It was JFK.
What we know as the Berliner is simply called Pfannkuchen in the city of Berlin. Two halves of dough are filled with filling (usually plum butter; or strawberry or raspberry jam) then stuck together to be deep-fried before they are covered with a layer of castor sugar. These days, the dough balls are fried then filled using a piping bag or decorating pen. Letting a little of the filling to show allows the customer to identify the jam that makes the filling.
The Berliner is different from most other doughnuts in that it makes use of yeast as proofing agent. So it takes a little more time to make. But it is so worth it. And if you want to poke a hole in the middle, do so; or if you want to cut it in half and fill it with pastry cream, do so.
I am including the basic Berliner recipe here. It is a sound starting point, you can be creative and be the best ‘Berliner’ you can be. And the nicest thing? You do not have to be from Berlin.
Berliner/Kreppel (Jam Doughnut)
Ingredients
• 500 grams plain all-purpose flour
• 100 grams butter
• 30 grams sugar
• 3 drops vanilla essence
