Yesterday was our first full and fantastic day in Berlin. We
began with a two-hour walking tour manly recounting the history of the east
side of the city. We met outside of the impressive Brandenburg Gate and then
jumped straight into the history of the Cold War. Our first stop was to a
bronze marker which indicated where US President Ronald Reagan stood when he
gave his famous Tear Down this Wall speech in 1987. For our generation, this is
history although it is still fresh in the minds of the generation before. Though
I’ve said it before, it’s incredible to me how much has occurred and changed in
Germany in such a relatively short amount of time, and Berlin is certainly a
testament to this.
My favorite part of the tour was when we visited
Rosenstrasse (Rose Street), which marked one of the few successful stories of
the German people’s resistance to the Nazi regime. The Nazi authorities
arrested, mostly men, of Jewish heritage from their places of work and held
them in Rosenstasse to be sent to concentration camps. Their spouses of
non-Jewish heritage demonstrated outside of the building where they were
captive day and night until their husbands and wives were released. Today there
is a stone memorial as a tribute to their bravery and perseverance.
After the tour we visited the Topography of Terror
information center which documents the history of the Nazi regime overtop where
the Gestapo headquarters were located. I was impressed by the amount of
information that was available, including original images and copies of
documents, and how it was presented. It followed the origins of the Nazi party
and how they assumed control of the government and used it as an instrument of
terror. I also appreciated how it emphasized the fact that the perpetrators of
state terror were human beings and not monsters that we could not find in our
world today. The Nazis are always the classical ‘bad guys’ in film and media
today (admittedly I thought of Indiana Jones when we were standing by where
book burnings took place). Reading the Nazi leaders’ biographies of them being
sons of postmen, teachers, and musicians was a somber reminder that they were
simply people and to be aware of what we are capable of as human beings.
Our day ended on a happier note, going to see Swan Lake at the Berlin Opera House. It
was a spectacular production. Everything was beautiful: the music, ballet,
costuming, and set. The opera house itself was a very modern, spartan building
but the performance itself was completely enchanting. I went to bed that night
with Tchaikovsky in my head and snow falling down outside on Berlin, not a bad
way to end the day!
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