Fact check
Berlin facts fact-checked: what is true and what is legend
There are sayings about Berlin that everyone has heard: more bridges than Venice, the doner was invented here, Kennedy called himself a doughnut. Some are true, some nearly true, and some are simply made up. We checked ten of them and tell you where things stand.
01 "Berlin has more bridges than Venice" True
Depending on how you count, Berlin has around 916 bridges over water, or more than 1,100 if you include all crossings over roads and railways. Venice has about 400 to 450. The comparison is a bit lopsided, because Berlin is much bigger and Venice only counts canal bridges, but it holds in every version. The real twist: Hamburg, with around 2,500 bridges, has far more than Berlin.
02 "Berlin is nine times the size of Paris" Nearly true
Berlin covers around 891 square kilometers, the city of Paris within its limits around 105. That is roughly 8.5 times, so "nine times" is generously rounded up. And it only applies to city limits: Greater Paris is much larger.
03 "The doner was invented in Berlin in 1972" Disputed
The name most often given is Kadir Nurman, who is said to have sold meat from a rotating spit in flatbread at Bahnhof Zoo in 1972. An association of Turkish doner producers honored him for it in 2011. But there are rivals: Mehmet Aygün says he was already selling doner in bread in Kreuzberg in 1971, and a man from Reutlingen claims he did it as early as 1969. There is no contemporary source for any of these claims. All that is certain: the rotating spit is much older, and the doner in bread as we know it grew up in Germany. Figures like "950 doner spits a day" circulate without any source, by the way.
04 "Currywurst is a Berlin invention" True
Herta Heuwer sold currywurst at her snack stand in Charlottenburg in 1949 and later registered the sauce as the trademark "Chillup". Hamburg claims the invention too, but mainly because of Uwe Timm's 1993 novella "The Invention of Curried Sausage", whose heroine is fictional. There are claims from the Ruhr area as well, but the Berlin story is the best documented. Where to eat a good one today is in Where Berliners actually eat.
05 "Kennedy called himself a doughnut" Legend
The story goes: Kennedy should have said "Ich bin Berliner", and the "ein" turned him into a pastry. Not true. "Ich bin Berliner" would have meant he came from Berlin; the "ein" makes it figurative, which is exactly what he meant. Besides, in Berlin the pastry is called a Pfannkuchen, so no one in front of Rathaus Schöneberg in 1963 thought of jam. The square where he spoke is full of flea market stalls on Saturdays and Sundays today, more in Skip X, try Y.
06 "A cross appears on the TV Tower" True
When the sun shines on the TV Tower's sphere, the light reflects in the shape of a cross, unplanned and right above the capital of the atheist GDR. Berliners called it "the Pope's revenge", and Ronald Reagan mentioned the cross in his 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate. The tower opened on 3 October 1969.
07 "The Ampelmännchen is a GDR invention" True
Traffic psychologist Karl Peglau presented the little man with the hat on 13 October 1961, the idea being that pedestrians respond more strongly to a figure than to a color. It took years before it appeared on traffic lights. After reunification it was to give way to the West German figure; protests saved it, and today it stands at many Berlin crossings again.
08 "The Quadriga once went to Paris" True
After his victory over Prussia, Napoleon had the Quadriga taken down from the Brandenburg Gate in 1806 and shipped in crates to Paris. Only after his defeat did it return in 1814. On its return, the figure, which originally depicted the goddess of peace, was given a Prussian eagle and an Iron Cross designed by Schinkel.
09 "Berlin has more museums than rainy days" True
Depending on how you count, Berlin has around 170 to 180 museums, and there are about 100 rainy days a year. So the saying is true. Only the often added "the only city in Europe" is not backed up anywhere. For grey days we have tips in Berlin in winter.
10 "Over 100 phone booths are book exchanges" Unproven
They really exist: old phone booths full of books, on the principle of take one, leave one, for example at Fehrbelliner Platz in Wilmersdorf. The idea comes from a Berlin initiative called BücherboXX. But we found no current total anywhere. The city's public bookshelves are listed on berlin.de.