[President Kennedy's body has been transported to the Capitol where it will remain in state pending his funeral tomorrow.  Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, West Germans have offered an outpouring of sorrow for their fallen fellow Berliner…]

by Cora Buhlert

Like most West Germans, news of the terrible events in Dallas reached me at home, just settling onto the sofa for an evening of TV. Like some ninety percent of West German television owners, I had my set tuned to the eight o'clock evening news tagesschau. But instead of the familiar tagesschau fanfare, the screen remained dark for a minute or two, something which has never happened before in the eleven years the program has been on the air. When the image finally returned, the visibly shaken news anchor Karl-Heinz Köpcke reported that John F. Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas, and was rushed to hospital. By the end of the program, we knew that Kennedy had not survived.

John F. Kennedy was extremely popular in West Germany, not least because of his memorable visit to our country earlier this year. And so many West Germans spontaneously burst into tears. People called friends and family, rang their neighbours' doorbells and shouted the news from windows to random passers-by on the street. Theatres and cinemas interrupted their programming, dancehalls closed down (on a Friday evening, i.e. prime business time) and in less an hour, the entire country was in shock.

The shock and grief was nowhere greater than in West Berlin, where Kennedy had won the hearts of the population, when he proclaimed "Ich bin ein Berliner" earlier this year. The people of Berlin took him by his word and mourned him as one of their own.

The students of the two big West Berlin universities heard the news during a student dance at the Hilton Hotel and spontaneously took to the streets, joined by many other Berliners. Several thousand – overwhelmingly young – people marched to the Rathaus Schöneberg, West Berlin's city hall, bearing torches, flowers and placards. 

"Berlin has lost its best friend", West Berlin's mayor Willy Brandt proclaimed last night on the very spot in front of the Rathaus Schöneberg where John F. Kennedy held his now historic speech only five months ago, while the gathered mourners provisionally renamed the square in front of the city hall "John-F.-Kennedy Platz". By now, Willy Brandt has announced that the square will be named in honour of Kennedy for real on Monday. I'm sure it won't be the last John F. Kennedy street or square in West Germany.

By today, the soon to be John-F.-Kennedy Platz was drowning in flowers and thousands of mourning West Germans had signed one of the condolence books laid out around the country. In West Berlin and elsewhere, people placed candles in their windows in memory of John F. Kennedy. Reportedly, flickering candles have also spotted on the far side of the Berlin Wall.

For John F. Kennedy was not just a friend of Berlin, he was a friend of all of Germany.