Last week, a scary headline appeared in the five or six German online and paper publications we check out each day.
The headline was: Half of Germans do not know when the Berlin Wall was built.
Quick check of our own knowledge: August 1961? Verification on Wikipedia, yes, August 1961, the 13th to be exact.
Only then did we work through the articles, which were based on the results of a poll, and were stunned to read sentences like this, with minimal variations between publications:
Only about half of all Germans know the exact date on which construction of the Berlin Wall began, 13 August 1961.
Not one of the articles had a positive wording of the fact that roughly half of Germans know the exact date of the Wall's beginnings.
As ardent amateur philosophers, we came up with some end of the world German philosophical thinking, some bleak Schoperhauer-Nietzsche construct supported by heavy Wagnerian badda bing in the background and a brief recollection of American expat Hanson admonishing Germans to be more optimistic.
But it's not that at all.
To the reader comments in the online publications we went, and we found some reasonable people. Well, in addition to the usual crowd lamenting the lack of knowledge of history in this country.
Why is the exact day so important? one reader asked.
We had asked that question and found the articles wanting. Of course, the writers said this was a very important date in recent German history, and there is no arguing about that. The exact date may matter to the people who were there, those who saw the concertina wire go up, those who realized their family was being torn apart right then and there.
As a polling question half a century later?
No newspaper in this country felt the need to ask how many Germans remembered the exact date of the beginning of World War I, which had been receiving coverage for over a year by last week.
The artificial outrage about German ignorance was a short lived affair, yet one fitting a pattern of unquestioning reporting combined with almost tabloid style headlines.
This, to us, is the disquieting aspect of it.
Can you imagine a full broadsheet page about the Vietnam War without any mention of the lies about the incident in the Gulf of Tonkin? Got that one, too, this year.
Fortunately, the old guy in the bar who'd invariably comment on the Berlin Wall article with a straight faced "well, under Adolf, they would have known the exact date of the Berlin Wall", has moved on.
Our last thought on the Half of Germans do not know when the Berlin Wall was built is that the newsrooms copied and pasted the 'executive summary' of the poll because the editors were busy writing about other events.
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