Rathaus Schöneberg, Berlin
AA-2026-0EAACB
On the image
Someone stood close to a stone wall in West Berlin and photographed a bronze plaque, which is the sort of thing tourists did with great solemnity in the 1960s when a monument had the word Freedom cast into it twice, once in German and once in English, just to be sure nobody missed the point. The bell in relief at the top is unmistakably modeled on Philadelphia's, because nothing said Cold War civic diplomacy quite like exporting an American icon to a divided city and bolting it to a tower.
The text below, now soft with age and hard to read even at the time without squinting, commemorated a gift that arrived with considerable ceremony and an enormous scroll of American names attached, the theory being that solidarity could be quantified in signatures. Whoever framed this shot was not composing art; they were doing the tourist's civic duty of proving they had stood before the right kind of history.
That the plaque has weathered into near illegibility is its own quiet joke on permanence: the bell it commemorates still rings on schedule, but the words explaining why have started to give up their fight with the wall.
The historian's note
This plaque is mounted on the tower of the Rathaus Schöneberg in Berlin and commemorates the Freedom Bell (Freiheitsglocke), a gift from the American people to the city of West Berlin, dedicated on October 24, 1950. The bell was cast in England, modeled directly on Philadelphia's Liberty Bell, and funded through the American "Crusade for Freedom" campaign, which collected more than 17 million signatures from Americans as an expression of solidarity following the Berlin Blockade and Airlift of 1948-49.
The bilingual inscription pairs Lincoln's Gettysburg Address phrase, "that this world, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom," with a German rendering of the same sentiment, framing the gift explicitly as a Cold War statement against Soviet-controlled East Berlin. The bell was formally rung for the first time by General Lucius D. Clay, the American military governor closely associated with the Airlift.
Rathaus Schöneberg, where the bell and this plaque are installed, served as the seat of the West Berlin government during the Cold War and later became internationally known as the site of President John F. Kennedy's 1963 "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, delivered a few years after the period this photograph documents.
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The Freedom Bell Plaque, Rathaus Schöneberg, West Berlin, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-0EAACB. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/the-freedom-bell-plaque-rathaus-sch-neberg-west-berlin-1960s.
@misc{aaAA20260EAACB,
title = {The Freedom Bell Plaque, Rathaus Schöneberg, West Berlin, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-0EAACB},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/the-freedom-bell-plaque-rathaus-sch-neberg-west-berlin-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - The Freedom Bell Plaque, Rathaus Schöneberg, West Berlin, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-0EAACB UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/the-freedom-bell-plaque-rathaus-sch-neberg-west-berlin-1960s ER -
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