So I finally read through all the previous posts to see how often I repeated myself. A little too often. You wanted proof I'm much closer to 60 than 50? There you go. No doubt the few people that look at the whole Blog will mind too terribly much. I am half hoping Lisa and Anna will read through before we finish our trip, so they will have a better understanding of why we're going to Germany. False hope?
So I mentioned a few things about the Wall (prob should capitalize it) already and orientation to the city. I should say we didn't get very close up to some of the World War II sites like the Soviet War Memorial in West Berlin, the Reichstag or the Brandenburg Gate. I looked at some of those photos and they're blurry, mostly because I took them out the window of our moving bus. At the time, I wanted to get closer to the Soviet Memorial in the Tiergarten. I remember thinking, I guess we are not permitted to get close to these sites. Apparently it wasn't on our itinerary to get closer. I had seen photos (pre-internet...you couldn't just find photos instantly) of the Soviet Memorial and I wanted to examine it up close. Sorry, not that trip.
Sign in front of the Brandenburg Gate, which sat just inside the Soviet Sector of the Berlin, and later in East Berlin. The sign in front says, "Attention, you're leaving West Berlin", although you couldn't legally travel through the gate in either direction.
I'll spare you the high school level history lecture on the history of Berlin. At some point we also motored by the Hungergabel at Templehof Airport, now decommissioned and a popular park. The 'hunger fork' is in reference to the Berlin Airlift. A week or so ago, the original "Candy Bomber" died, Gail Halvorson. A shining U.S./British moment in a very dark period.
One sobering place we did stop, perhaps during that same whirlwind look at the city, was the Plötzensee Memorial, dedicated to those who were executed on the site, some 3,000, at the hands of the Nazis. This is one of the early Berlin memorials to the human costs of the Hitler dictatorship. My guess is that it has been overshadowed by the newer Holocaust Memorial completed in 2005. It's easy to quickly be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the Nazi misery, suffering and murder.
Here is a photo from Plötzensee:
It would be wrong if I said I'm "looking forward" to seeing Berlin's Holocaust Memorial. It forever astounds me how far so many in Germany have come toward "truth and reconciliation" in a relatively short period. Compare that with the U.S. and lynching, and all the monuments to the Confederacy that are only now beginning to come down. I've visited Atlanta a couple of times, and it's remarkable how commonplace it is to visit Stone Mountain's memorial. I would never go there, but five MILLION people trek there each year. Chilling. Meanwhile, there are all of those Americans who are moving backwards and not towards an honest reckoning with the Nation's ugly past. Anyway, I've never been close to Auschwitz, and I passed up my opportunity to go to Dachau years ago. The last time I was in D.C. it was only for a few hours with Lisa on our way to the Baltimore airport. When I was there for more time than that, the Holocaust Museum hadn't been completed. So this is my chance to see the memorial dedicated to the family connections I will never have the chance to know. Less personally, of course, I have read, seen and felt so much about the topic that visiting will be chance to physically inhabit the collective grief that haunts humanity.
Seated from left: Me, Barb Washa, Ann Buller, Diana Fleming Mackie, Brenda Lansing Alexander, Stacy Soderholm Davidsaver, tour guide (not sure why he's here). Second row, standing, Lindy Kaye Anderson, Kathy Grzenia Pierce, John Fredrickson, Dave Dedie, Brian Hischke, Tami ?, Curt Herwig, East Teacher Marie Nelson. Third row, Karen Hegge, Ann Conklin, Kathy Brockman Lewis, Clint Miller, Lisa Page, ?, Chris Bradle, Mike Niemann, Peter Reinhardt, Liz ?, Dennis Bergren
The above photo is way out of order, but I thought I ought to include it somewhere. Good photo of everyone!
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