In what year did the Berlin Wall fall?

1989, and it came down on 9 November largely because of a badly answered question. An East German official, Gunter Schabowski, was handed new travel regulations shortly before a live press conference without being briefed on when they took effect. Asked when, he shuffled his papers and said, as far as he knew, immediately.

It was broadcast, crowds went to the checkpoints, and the guards had no orders. At Bornholmer Strasse the officer in charge, Harald Jager, phoned repeatedly for instructions, got none, and eventually opened the barrier on his own authority rather than order his men to fire into a crowd of thousands. The wall that had stood twenty-eight years was breached by a middle-ranking officer deciding not to make it worse.

It had gone up in 1961 for one reason - to stop people leaving, after some 3.5 million had walked west through Berlin, disproportionately the young and skilled. At least 140 people were killed trying to cross it. Germany reunified less than a year later, in October 1990, faster than almost anyone had thought possible, and the phrase for the psychological division that outlasted the concrete - die Mauer im Kopf, the wall in the head - is still in use.