BERLIN-
A new museum that will be known simply as The Kennedys is scheduled to open in Berlin Nov. 11.
The museum will be located on Pariser Platz close to the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag and will include photos, documents, films and artifacts, including the late president’s attache case and his wife Jacqueline’s signature pillbox hat.
Kennedy visited Berlin five months before his November 1963 assassination and uttered one of the most celebrated lines of his presidency there: “Ich bin ein Berliner”–I am a Berliner.
The statement was a declaration of Kennedy’s solidarity with a city that was then a flash point of the Cold War. Communist East Germany had built the Berlin Wall in 1961 along the post-World War II dividing line between East and West Berlin, cutting off the people on either side from each other. The wall came down in 1989, in the twilight of communist rule over Eastern Europe.
Kennedy, who was known for his internationalism and his fierce opposition to Soviet control of Eastern Europe, was a beloved figure around the continent.
Other places named for him in Europe include the Kennedy Bridge or Kennedy-Brucke in Hamburg, Germany; 10 streets and two squares in and around Athens; and an Avenue John F. Kennedy in Brussels, Belgium, which runs through a city park. An automobile museum called Autoworld is located inside the Belgian park and its exhibits include a limousine that purportedly was used to transport Kennedy. In Southeast Ireland, in County Wexford, Kennedy fans can visit his ancestral home, where his great-grandfather lived, along with the JFK Arboretum.
