Facists and Communists

Dear reader(s),

Today was my third day in the fair (but freezing!) city of Berlin. I apologize for not posting yesterday; I'm still a little jet-lagged so I chose sleep over blogging.

We've seen a lot in the past two days, so I'm going to be brief about most of it.

Yesterday we did the really big touristy things - namely, the Reichstag (central Berlin government building and home of the former Weimar Republic) and the Brandenburg Gate, a big gorgeous gate that used to be the entrance into Berlin from the Kaiser's hunting grounds (which are now a HUGE park, the Tiergarten). I got a couple good shots of them before the battery in my camera died:

Reichstag

 

 

Front of the Brandenburg Gate from Pariser Platz

The front of the Brandenburg Gate looks out over Pariser Platz, which is full of touristy things (and the American Embassy!) and then leads out onto Unter den Linden. The "Linden" refers to the Linden trees that are planted there, although our professor told us that all the trees there now are new because the Nazis tore them up in the 40's. Apparently they got in the way of their marches.

We went to the Deutches History Museum yesterday as well and saw the Hitler exhibit, which was super interesting. Today we also saw a lot of Nazi things, like the Gestapo Museum on the site of their former headquarters, the Luftwaffe building (a stunning example of Nazi architecture that I unfortunately do not have a picture of), and the site of Hitler's bunker. We actually stood on top of the room where Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves. It was pretty weird, especially since immediately afterward we saw the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It's hard to know how to feel towards the German people when you see all of those things, especially since there's a lot of things in the museums that make it pretty obvious that everyone either knew or could have easily found out what was really going on with the war and the Holocaust.

One of my favorite parts of today was that outside the Gestapo museum there was a big section of the Berlin Wall still intact with some old graffiti on it. My favorite message said (in English): "To Astrid: Maybe someday we will be together". I wonder if Astrid was the writer's girlfriend or sister or mother and if they ever found each other after the wall fell.

The impression that I get from Berlin overall is of a city that's still healing. There are lots of things still being renovated and fixed and rebuilt; it's like you can see the scars all over the city. And some of the Berliners (and tourists) don't even seem to notice. At the Memorial to the Murdered Jews, there were 27,000 of these concrete stellae that were supposed to represent graves - a really somber place - but people (mainly tourists) were running around, laughing, standing (even walking!) on the stellae, and I even saw a couple kissing in between them. I can't personally think of many things that are less romantic or comedic than twenty seven hundred stones that represent the graves of Holocaust victims, but apparently I'm in the minority. And the city just kind of goes on around it, because...what else can it do, really?

So I'm still working through a lot of mixed feelings about Berlin history, and in the meantime enjoying all the new and different German things (and trying to improve my meager German skills). Tonight I'll be going to the opera to see the Marriage of Figaro and the opera house is apparently gorgeous, so expect pictures of that soon.

Tschuss, mein fruends!

 Anna