Dr. Martin Luther King’s Visit to Cold War Berlin

Tracing an Untold Story: Dr. Martin Luther King’s Visit to Cold War Berlin. East or West – God’s Children

When invited by West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt in 1964 to open the 14th annual cultural festival of the city, which had prepared a triumphant welcome for President John F. Kennedy only one year before, Dr. Martin Luther King used the opportunity to extend his spiritual message of brotherhood to the situation of Cold War Berlin, arguing that although the city “stands as a symbol of the division of men on the face of the earth,” it was clear that “on either side of the wall are God’s children, and no man-made barrier can obliterate that fact.”

Dr. King’s visit to Cold War Berlin in September 1964 had been prepared by Willy Brandt’s 1961 visit to the U.S. and his meeting with King. Another important facilitator was Provost Heinrich Grüber, the former pastor at East Berlin’s St. Mary’s Church. Grüber had been an active opponent of the Nazi regime, gaining international attention when he testified during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the leading architects of the Holocaust, in Jerusalem in 1961. Invited by U.S. churches, Grüber began to travel across the U.S. delivering sermons in the following years. He also met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and encountered the African-American struggle for civil rights firsthand. Perceiving this struggle as similar to his resistance to fascism, Grüber took up correspondence with Dr. King, already inviting him to Berlin in the course of 1963.

In his one and a half days in the city, Dr. King completed a whirlwind tour. He visited the Berlin Wall, where only the day before an East German had escaped to the West, provoking a gun battle between U.S. soldiers and East German border guards. King opened the city’s cultural festival that also included a memorial service for John F. Kennedy at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, delivered a sermon to more than 20,000 West Berliners at an outdoor arena, and was awarded an honorary degree by the Theological School of the Protestant Church.

Most spectacularly, even without a passport, King managed to cross the border at Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin, where he preached to an enthusiastic crowd in the overflowing St. Mary’s Church at Alexander Square about the struggle for civil rights in his own country, bringing greetings from the “Christian brothers and sisters” both from the United States and West Berlin. Since so many (especially young) people came to see Dr. King, he had to hold another service in the nearby Sophia Church for almost 2,000 people. Afterwards, he met with students from Humboldt University and church officials before returning to the sector of the city controlled by the Western Allies.

Although Dr. King refrained from making any comments about the political situation in Germany, his visit undoubtedly sharpened his belief in the “common humanity” that binds people together “regardless of the barriers of race, creed, ideology, or nationality.” As he argued in his speeches in both parts of the divided city, “Whether it be East or West, men or women search for meaning, hope for fulfillment, yearn for faith in something beyond themselves, and cry desperately for love and community to support them in this pilgrim journey.”

Only three months later, when invited to Oslo in December 1964 to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. King referred once again to globally significant themes that continue to resonate today: racial injustice, poverty, and war. In a world threatened with nuclear extinction and the Cold War confrontation between East and West, Dr. King argued that, “In one sense the civil rights movement in the United States is a special American phenomenon which must be understood in the light of American history and dealt with in terms of the American situation. But on another and more important level, what is happening in the United States today is a relatively small part of a world development.”

King claimed that all human beings were tied together in a “world-wide fellowship,” and that “However deeply American Negroes are caught in the struggle to be at last at home in our homeland of the United States, we cannot ignore the larger world house in which we are also dwellers.”

Although historical memory has largely ignored Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to Cold War Berlin, his appearance there and his message of peaceful social revolution not only inspired Germans on both sides of Iron Curtain. It also stands as yet another symbol for the global reach and impact of the African-American civil rights movement.

For Germans of all ages, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became an icon of civil and human rights during the Cold War who exposed America’s failure to fulfill its democratic promise. When he was murdered on April 4, 1968, Germans across the country gathered in mourning to them, King represented a voice for a better America that spoke to people’s aspirations worldwide. When Barack Obama addressed more than 200,000 enthusiastic Berliners during his presidential campaign in 2008, the German press therefore evoked not only the memory of John F. Kennedys visit to the city in 1963 but also that of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the following year.