A Rainy Saturday in Berlin

While we had been blessed with beautiful, warm weather, we weren't so lucky on Saturday. It was overcast and lightly drizzling throughout the day. My bright pink raincoat (the one I used in NYC) came in handy along with my backpack cover to keep my items safe.

Our first stop was the Topography of Terror. This is not a memorial, but a museum, as our tour guide was quick to point out. The building stands on what use to be the headquarters of the Gestapo and Secret Police (also known as the SS and it wasn't really secret). The point of the exhibit is to document what the perpetrators did during the Nazi reign and the consequences.

When you walk in, you're greeted with a white and slate gray floor and walls. You immediately feel chills and there is also a stateliness of the place. After checking our bags, our tour guide arrived to show us around. He was an excellent docent and we actually looked at the exhibit backwards. He was quick to point out the problems of photographs. We had to question who took the photograph and what was missing. He had us deeply analyze a photo of a mass killing and it was fascinating to watch the gears in everyone's heads turn.

The tour ended up being two hours long. While excellent, it didn't give us much chance to explore the exhibit on our own. We got about twenty minutes and I tried to take in as many photographs and documents as I could. The group reunited and we had lunch at Curry at the Wall. It was a hopping place, mainly used my tourists and I had the chance to try a curry wurst. Basically it's sausage with ketchup and curry powder. Tasty. It was still raining and so we ventured onward.

The group made a quick stop at Neue Wache. It's a statue of a mother and her dying solider son. This statue sits on top of a tomb of a forgotten solider and a victim of a concentration camp. It sits in a mostly enclosed area except for an open circle directly above the statue. We've been told that in the winter, snow falls on the statue and it's left like that. This site has been dedicated to the victims of tyranny and war.

Our final stop was the Deutsches Historisches Museum. The purpose was to see Diversity Destroyed, an 2013 exhibit about the Holocaust. This coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Nazi rise to power (1933). As well as this central exhibit, there are statues placed throughout the city. This exhibit reviewed much of the information we have already heavily discussed while in Berlin, but the valuable primary sources really excited me. Once our guide was done explaining things, we got the opportunity to view the rest of the museum.

The museum is to showcase German history. Once again, there was so much to cover. I was content with simply wandering and looking. This museum, architecture and feeling wise, felt like the Louvre, Musee D'Orsay, and the Met combined.

By this point, we were all tired and cold. Professor Keenan treated us to coffee and a treat at a local coffeeshop. We chatted about what impressed and disappointed us the most thus far and if we had any ideas about the topic of our final paper.

Warm and happy, it was back to our hotel to freshen up and then ate at an authentic German restaurant. Once full, we went back to the hotel to catch up on our journals and get some sleep.