The girl who hadn’t heard of the Berlin Wall

‘Question 2. In which year did the Berlin Wall come down?’ shouted the quizmaster. And then he repeated this with dramatic pauses, as quizmasters are apt to do: ‘In which year…did the Berlin Wall…come down?’

‘Oh, yeah!’ said the youngest person in our team. ‘I just got that!’

‘What?’ I said.

‘Berlin Wall!’ she said, with a huge grin on her face.

‘1989,’ hissed one of the team members. ‘Yup, 89, definitely,’ whispered another member. ‘I remember because I’d just got divorced and I was driving down the Santa Monica Freeway and…’

But the youngest member of the team was still having something of an epiphany. ‘Berlin Wall!’ she kept exclaiming.

I now wish she had not continued telling us what it was she wanted to confess. Because now she has, I don’t feel safe at all in this strange world we inhabit. I already felt pretty unstable in it, as you know. Now I just feel desperate. Disconsolate. Hopeless. Dejected. More convinced than ever that we are all sleepwalking to a terrible end in which civilisation will be abandoned in favour of eternal chaos.

I don’t know who to blame, exactly, nor which institution above all others should be held accountable for this decline. All I know is that a twenty-something member of our pub quiz team beamed with satisfaction as she declared: ‘I never realised there was actually a wall. In Berlin!’

‘I’m sorry?’ I said, as my heart thumped with foreboding.

‘The Berlin Wall!’ she laughed again. ‘There was a physical wall, then? That came down?’ She sipped her drink, looking pleased, as if she had just solved a riddle that had hitherto been impossible to get to the bottom of. ‘It always puzzled me, you know, when people were going on about the Berlin Wall.