It was begun on this date in 1961, and generations of humans knew no life before it.
To many schoolchildren, the resulting geopolitical separations seemed as natural as those formed by natural boundaries in their own countries.
Jokes about athletes from the two countries (which now are not so funny, in light of the lawsuits and gender reassignment surgeries) became common around Olympics time. Otherwise, there was no humor to be found anywhere near this subject.
How could you find humor in it? People were shot and left to bleed to death trying for a better life, trying to get past the Berlin Wall, which was begun on Aug. 13, 1961.
For Dr. Jocelyn Elders, born on Aug. 13, 1933, and who didn't back down from progressive positions on masturbation and contraceptives.
In 1990, every member of my fourth-grade class took turns holding a piece of the Berlin Wall.
To an adolescent, not one of us had any fucking idea the symbolism of those acts.
Mark Kowalski* had been to Germany for some vacation, and he'd brought back a piece of the wall.
I don't think he understood, even having been there, what he had brought back. I certainly didn't. Of the lot of us, I think only Paul Paksukcharem, thoroughly steeped in international relations even as a youngster (his father worked for the IMF), had anything beyond an inkling.
Oh, sure, we knew factually what the Berlin Wall was. It separated East and West Germany. We knew East Germany's capital was Berlin and West Germany's was Bonn.
But we didn't understand life beyond the facts. My peers and I grew up in the fading years of the Cold War (which I for the longest time thought was an issue of keeping people warm enough in the winter), and much was simply not talked about. Maybe that's because the adults didn't want to think about it. Maybe it's because many of them sensed it was ending.
And maybe it's because they didn't want to inflict all that fear on us at such a young age. Maybe enough of them had grown tired of the "get under your desk" drills and "damn commies" propaganda and just wanted a life free of those trappings.
Whatever the reason, we were absolutely clueless regarding the ramifications of the fall of the Berlin Wall. To this day, a big part of me, trapped in childhood, still thinks of East and West Germany, like North and South Korea, as politely divorced parents who aren't on speaking terms but who will at least piss on one if the other is on fire.
And I'm in my 20s. My brother was born in 1988, is considering changing majors to political science and remembers probably nothing from 1990.
This generation, the youth vote (18-26), remembers little and understands less freshly from the time when West Germany and East Germany participated in the Olympics. That's partly because when you're born into something, it seems natural, and partly because the longer something exists, the less people feel the need to explain it.
This generation remembers little of Gulf War I and less of the other conflicts in the Middle East; I am constantly having to remind myself of the days when the U.S. was funding Osama bin Laden — simply because such a thing seems anathema today.
And since the average U.S. history class is not covering that period, struggling to get as far as 1945, a lot of Americans are growing up without much of any substantive clue about what has happened since 1945. We might know the names of the presidents (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, @$)*(#%^)), but our knowledge of those presidents is often caricaturized, and our knowledge of the history and policy of the time is often polarized. For those who don't see communism as fundamentally evil (and you're reading the writing of one such person), there's a tremendous struggle to understand why we railed against it.
I'll let you know when I get to that understanding.
This rambling diary brings me to the following position:
The average high school graduate should not be familiar with Elbridge Gerry at the expense of Gerry Ford.
The average high school graduate should not know more about the Era of Good Feeling than the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The average high school graduate should not know more about the genesis of World War I than the genesis of the Vietnam War.
The average high school graduate should understand the significance of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and be able to show where it was on an unmarked map of Germany.
The average high school graduate should have a sense of the U.S. economy from the 1960s to 1980s and know that "Made in Japan" used to be code for "If you buy this, it will break."
The average high school graduate should be able to explain the significance of Nixon's trip to China and the pingpong team he sent there.
And the average high school history education should not stop before the average high school student's parents were born.
*Yeah, totally not using real names here. One of the fellows is on facebook. Find him and you can find me.