Adventures in Berlin
- matthewfox2019
- Feb 18, 2018
- 3 min read
This past week, my study abroad program went to Berlin and Prague! It was a really great program excursion! I have been to Berlin one time before but this visit I was able to really see a lot more of the city! One of the historic monuments I saw was the Brandenburg Gate. I was really interested in the history of the Brandenburg Gate. Completed in 1791, the gate has been a landmark of Berlin for a very long time. Many different events have occured at the gate and even though it has been a symbol of the troubled history in Europe, it is now a sign of European unity and peace. I was really struck with the symbol of the gate in the context of post-war Germany.

The gate was trapped on the side of the communist East Berlin after the war. The Berlin wall was even constructed so that the gate would be on the Soviet side.
This really made me think about the importance of symbols in the world. The space in front of the gate in West Berlin had been used as a staging ground for Western protests. West Berliner's use to gather on the western side of the gate to demonstrate against the wall. The entire trip really made me think about what the people of East Berlin had to go through.
I could not imagine waking up one day and all of a sudden because of where my house was, being thrown into a dictatorial communist state. We were also very fortunate to hear the story of someone who had grown up in East Germany. We got to hear about the lack of freedom and the great difficulties of growing up in East Berlin. It really made me reflect on how fortunate I am to be able to grow up in a free democracy such as the United States.
A monument in Berlin that really made me think and reflect was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. I had seen it the last time I went to Berlin in 2016 but seeing it again, I thought of it in a different way. Opened in 2005, the memorial is made of concrete slabs of varing sizes and orientations. It's design is very ambigous and is open to interpretation based on the person. While I originally did not really understand why a memorial like this would not have writing or plaques or something of the like, after walking through the passage ways at the memorial and looking around at seeing all of the different concrete slabs, I had some new perspectives.

Looking around, I thought of the concrete slabs as dark symbols of the sheer vastness of how many people had been murdered by the Nazi regime. The first time I saw the monument in 2016, I did not entirely understand it. In 2016, I went to Auschwitz and visited other Holocaust sights. I think after seeing those places of horror, it shaped how I saw the memorial on this past trip. I saw the concrete slabs as symbols of tombs and when I looked down the passage ways in the monuments, thought of it as a never ending line of tombs. To me, it symbolized the unbelievable magnitude of the loss of life due to the Nazi regime. It was a really interesting memorial to see and something I would reccomend to anyone visiting Berlin.
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