West Berlin, Germany
AA-2026-DF2B12
On the image
The boys have been arranged on the steps in the traditional formation of a school trip photograph: tallest at the back, glasses in the middle rows, and at least one child in red trousers who was clearly not consulted about the dress code. Behind them a bronze relief of John F. Kennedy looks out from a stone plaque, doing the job memorials do, which is to preside solemnly over events they were never invited to.
No one in the front rows is looking at the plaque. They are looking at the camera, because to a twelve-year-old in a maroon coat a class photograph outranks a piece of Cold War civic memory bolted to a wall behind him. The teacher at the back, cardigan buttoned, glasses on, has the specific tired posture of a man who has already counted these heads eleven times since breakfast.
Somewhere in West Berlin in the years after 1963, a city grieving a president it had briefly claimed as its own put up a monument, and a school, on its annual outing, simply arranged the group photo in front of it because the steps were wide and the light was good.
The historian's note
The plaque shown commemorates President John F. Kennedy, whose visit to Berlin in June 1963 and his declaration of solidarity with the city made him, briefly, a local hero as much as an American statesman. After his assassination in November of that year, West Berlin authorities and civic institutions erected memorials and renamed public spaces in his honor, a wave of commemoration that continued through the mid-1960s.
School excursions to such sites became a routine part of civic education in West Germany during this period, pairing a lesson in recent political history with an ordinary group outing. The mixed, informal clothing worn by the boys is typical of West German schoolwear in the 1960s, a period before school uniforms and before the more uniform casualwear of later decades.
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Schoolboys Beside a Kennedy Memorial Plaque, West Berlin, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-DF2B12. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/schoolboys-beside-a-kennedy-memorial-plaque-west-berlin-1960s.
@misc{aaAA2026DF2B12,
title = {Schoolboys Beside a Kennedy Memorial Plaque, West Berlin, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-DF2B12},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/schoolboys-beside-a-kennedy-memorial-plaque-west-berlin-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Schoolboys Beside a Kennedy Memorial Plaque, West Berlin, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-DF2B12 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/schoolboys-beside-a-kennedy-memorial-plaque-west-berlin-1960s ER -
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