Richard Sambrook is the BBC News Director, an important and fascinating post and, happily, he keeps his blog and twitter feed going pretty regularly. On his blog, he looks back to the fall of the Berlin wall (Youtube) which he hastily had to cover.
Twenty years ago today, I was sitting in the BBC’s London newsroom editing the 9 O’Clock News – the main evening TV news bulletin. I can’t remember what else had happened that day but I know we had the programme pretty much sorted out when, as I recall, just after 7pm a piece of copy landed from Reuters that was either the biggest story of my career or the biggest mistake Reuters could have made. Needless to say it was the former. A live news conference in East Germany had announced, in a confused way, that East Germans were free to cross into the west and vice versa. The Berlin Wall was over.
I was seven whole years old at the time, and a schoolfriend – whose great (or great great) aunt was Jessica Tandy, funnily enough – procured some of the wall somehow. We inspected it like it was moon dust, before realising it was just some crumbling brickwork. But it was far, far more than just a wall. Anyway. Have a read.
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Completely useless bit of information but have you heard the urban legend about Kennedy calling himself a doughnut?
Stick ich bin ein berliner into google and you’ll see what I mean.
LOL it’s true though. That comes from the German postfix -er to denote “belonging to” or “from” e.g. ich bin ein Bonner – I’m from Bonn.
Comparable also to the “von” in German or “da” in Italian e.g. Leonardo da Vinci
At least I’m not from Frankfurt or Hamburg …
Wraye, I thought the ein was extraneous? Should it not be Ich Bin Berliner?
Sean, you are right when it is spoken – in most dialects it gets swallowed to an extended n as in: Ich bin’n’ Berliner
In correct written German, the article is necessary as “Berliner” is a noun, not an adjective. In German, all nouns start with a capital letter. Otherwise you are saying that you are berliny. Hope this helps