Between the rows of picturesque old homes and cobbled streets, something ominous looms in Germany: the past. As you can imagine, when visiting Germany one cannot escape the devastation that engulfed the country during the Cold War, and the entire world in the wake of the Second World War. However, as the country in which Adolph Hitler built his Nazi regime, Germany has a unique relationship with the holocaust and offers a perspective on the subject that I've never encountered before. It is one of both critical reflection and rememberance, despair and hope, and an exceptional desire to spread knowledge, in the hope that something so horrendous may never happen again.
- Homes in Lüneburg, Germany-
However, one of the more chilling aspects of our time spent here visiting various museums and churches, is that there are certain parallels between our present and the past that I sometimes found hard to take in. While spending a day in Berlin, we had the opportunity to visit the Topography of Terror: a museum now located where the SS and Gestapo headquarters once stood. One of the main goals of the museum is to explicate how exactly a nation could willingly elect someone like Hitler into power. The answer? In the shortest terms possible: rhetoric and propoganda. I'd always found this hard to wrap my head around, because the Hitler I picture is a fascist and murderer. However, I'd never really considered that when he was elected, many of the people of Germany saw him as a charismatic leader. He promised to "make Germany strong again" while instilling a sense of "Volk," or people's, community in the nation.The entire basis of his appeal was creating an ideology within the people that made it acceptable to pin yellow stars of identification on Jews, and make the "Volk" believe that by taking people of difference to concentration camps, the Third Reich was protecting them from "threats." I have no desire to make any sweeping political claims or demonize any specific people; however, I'm sure you can't help but feel as if you've heard that type of language and some of those ideas used by American politicians before, not in the distant past, but within the last year. In myself, as I wandered through the Topography of Terror, seeing those similarities caused my mind to race, my stomach to drop, and my heart to sink.
Beyond learning more about how WWII came to be, we were able to see some of the lasting destruction ourselves. In Lübeck, Germany we visited Marienkirche, one of the many churches in Germany to have been destroyed during WWII. While the church has since been rebuilt and restored to a striking beauty, a monument to its past remains in the form of two bells. They sit sunken into the ground at the back of the church, just as they had been after the church had been demolished by a bomb. When seeing some of the damage of the war first hand, it began to feel more real to me. Being a continent away and so many decades removed from WWII and its devastation, it's hard to imagine that that kind of destruction could have ever happened beyond the confines of a Hollywood set, even though it still happens daily in distant cities I have never seen. Yet Marienkirche was just the preview to our encounters with destruction. In Hamburg, St. Nicholas church has been reduced to ruins aside from its sykscrapjng tower and a few columned walls. The decision was made to not restore St. Nicholas in order for it to be a memorial of the war. However, one new addition to St. Nicholas is the museum that is situated beneath the foundation of the old church. There, I was offered a perspective to WWII that I had never encountered, that of the German citizens. While I've read personal accounts of Jewish people who were targeted during the war, I'd never read those of Germans who would have been considered part of the Volkcommunity. It's easy to forget that in a war it is not the Adolf Hitlers, and Heinrich Himmlers of our adversaries who are affected by bombings most often; it is the civilians. Of all the new things I have learned regarding WWII, or any war, from my time in Germany, it is to remember the plight of every person who is affected by war, and that war is rarely a solution, but a reaction.
- A portion of the East Side Gallery at the Berlin Wall -
When I started writing this post, I had intended to touch on how much less I knew about the effects of Berlin Wall than I thought I did, but I can only write about devastating things for so many paragraphs. Plus, I'd hate for any of you to think that this has been a completely depressing adventure. There are certainly harrowing moments, but there are ten times as many joyous and wonderful things that we've experienced. One of which for me was the East Side Gallery at the Berlin Wall. It's the longest stretch of the wall that remains, and it's covered in murals for its entire 1.3 kilometer span. To me, the murals act as a way of reclaiming the wall, making it something new that not only challenges the ideals of the past, but offers hope for a brighter future where we have learned from our mistakes. Aside from just figurative paintings, there are many quotes on the wall too, and the one pictured above was by far my favorite because it can be read two ways. On one hand, it suggests that the Berlin Wall, the action of small people in a small place, has tragically altered the face of the world. Yet on the other hand, the hand I prefer and extend to you, it can be read as a message of hope. We may all be small people, in many spread out small places, but even the smallest of our actions can change the face of the world and alter it, in a way that is good.
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