Reflection

(Note: There are no pictures on this because I don’t feel it is appropriate for what I am posting.)

Berlin is a city of major history in the Western World, and since the city is placed in the center of our trip, it is also a great place for reflection on this tour and on the current scope of politics in the Western World.

Before this tour I went with my family to the Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Washington D.C. It was a beautiful memorial, and that’s just it. It was beautiful. It was, uneasy being in there because it made beauty out of tragedy and beauty out of what is currently happening in Syria and beauty out of something simply not.

(not to trash on the memorial of course, it is beautiful and very much needed, but it is a different experience than what I am about to describe).

Going to Berlin and watching the city carry on in a place where life was bleak was by far much more chilling than going to memorials, seeing piles of shoes, staring at where gas chambers used to run and where shootings took place.

Staring at what once was where Adolf Hitler delivered his first campaign speeches now is a natural history museum, looking at where the Berlin wall once stood now just a busy street, looking at beautifully renovated homes that held SS guardsmen, that was nothing like you would experience in the States.

It was humbling, haunting and hopeful.

Carrying on, learning from mistakes, but letting life continue and be life is most important to me, and to see this happening in places where one of the largest tragedies we learn in western schooling is most important to me. They are making moves to make life better while also recognizing their past in its entirety, even if they didn’t in the past.

Those of you who know me know that I was looking forward to Berlin the most, because of the Berlin Wall, the Topographies of Terror and the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. Not necessarily excited, but looking forward to these places. I wanted to see these places because of the reminder they set for us, particularly and currently Americans in the aftermath of the 2016 election, in the aftermath of Charlottesville Riots, and what will continue. History doesn’t repeat, but it does fall on the same tracks, and without these constant, humbling reminders, without traveling and voting and checking yourself, we end up on the same tracks before we even realize what has happened.