Berlin: My Experiences

I liked Berlin. I liked the way history was all around me, even if it was subtlety lurking in the walls of the buildings I walked past. You can’t ignore the city’s history without ignoring the city itself. Berlin is totally unique. It has a big-city rhythm and a very cool way of looking both forward and backward. You can see the Berliners’ remembrance of the past almost everywhere you look. It is in the city’s architecture and numerous memorials. But you can see them looking to the future in the way they have physically and conceptually repurposed buildings and symbols that were once used by the Nazis and Soviets. And it doesn’t take long to hear it when you listen to the attitudes and opinions of their young educated people.

My favorite parts of the week were the bike tour and the free evening. The sunny, warm weather made the bike tour even more enjoyable for me, I will admit. But, weather notwithstanding, it was still so fun to ride through the city on bikes and get to experience it a little bit more like Berliners.

During the free evening, I got to see the Brandenburg Gate lit up for nighttime. Midnight on a Wednesday is a great time to get some photos! We also had some delicious Berlin currywurst mit pommes from a little place under the train tracks. We went down to the East Side Gallery after dark. It is a testament to the Berliner spirit that something which was intended to imprison citizens is now used to promote messages of peace and equality and to promote artistic individuality.

I also visited the Topographies of Terror exhibit. It was pretty intense, but I think very well done. I learned a lot about the Gestapo and the way Hitler’s Germany was run. There were pictures of mass graves and medical experiment victims, but for me the most chilling photographs were of the young men and women who worked as SS officers in the concentration camps, taken while they were out on retreat in the mountains near Auschwitz. What really got to me was their genuine laughing smiles and the sense of friendly camaraderie between them. It could have been a picture of me and my friends, but these were some of the people involved in overseeing or documenting the mass murder and enslavement of thousands of innocent people.

The most impactful thing I saw this week was the Hohenshönhausen prison. I knew East Berlin was a tough place to be; if 150 people were shot down trying to climb a wall to leave their city, it had to be bad. But, I did not realize how bad things could get. The spying civilian informants, monitoring devices in homes and public areas, and secret arrests are things we see in dystopian, George Orwell-esque movies and books. They are not things that my generation of Americans has ever had to imagine living with or even really existing. It made this totalitarian single-mindedness of Stalin communism very real for me. I felt a very sincere feeling of panic start to build up in me while we were standing in one of the prison cells. To be imprisoned without committing a crime is a terrible thing. But, to be imprisoned under such dehumanizing conditions without having committed any crime is the stuff of nightmares and horror stories: horror stories that hundreds of people lived through.

But, the Berliners have what I think is a wonderful way of accepting the past instead of ignoring it, while also moving on into the future that they hope will be brighter. They carry the lessons of the past well, even though theirs are especially difficult ones.