The Whistle Was a Warning. The Berlin Wall Fell Anyway.

On 4 October 2010, twenty years after German reunification, St Kilian’s Deutsche Schule in Clonskeagh, Dublin, built its own Berlin Wall down the middle of the gym.

It was made of polystyrene, painted by the children. Lined up on either side were around two hundred and fifty pupils aged seven to twelve, from about forty countries. There was a teacher with a whistle. There was a plan: whistle, speech, wall comes down.

The whistle was meant only to get their attention.

The children had not been told about whistles meant only to get their attention. They went, from both sides at once. Polystyrene, struck by two hundred and fifty children, does nothing at all for a tenth of a second and then everything.

The wall came down before the speech. The running order was perfectly sound; it had simply been outvoted by two hundred and fifty children.

And of course it was history repeating itself in miniature. Nobody in Berlin in 1989 waited for the official announcement to be finished, either.

One of the parents there had been sixteen in Berlin in November 1989. On the morning after the border opened she and her friends skipped school and went to the Wall, because that was where everyone was going. Her cousins lived in the East. She had grown up knowing them as voices on the phone and faces at a checkpoint. That winter, for the first time, they came to her family’s house and sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, like anyone else.

So the children of St Kilian’s learned 1989 roughly the way she had learned it: all at once, without permission, before anyone had finished explaining.

I have tried to stage-manage history in my own house, with similar results. For the youngest’s project on the fall of the Wall, I built a wall of shoeboxes across the living room, painted with slogans, and planned to explain the Cold War before anyone touched it.

I said, “Right, before we start.” The youngest and two friends took this as the whistle.

The wall was down in under four seconds. One friend was wearing a shoebox as a hat. The other was carrying a section of the Berlin Wall labelled ADIDAS to the kitchen as a souvenir. My husband, who had come in to watch, said it was very authentic.

I gave the speech anyway, to three children sitting on bits of wall. They listened better than they would have standing up.