Out and About in Germany: Every day is a field trip here
As I sit down to write this blog post, which GEO has told me should be about field trips and landmarks, I’m preparing for our first day in Berlin, which will include a city tour. Professor Bormann includes sets up these tours for us on our first day in each of our new cities to help us get our bearings, understand what we’re seeing as we walk past, and of course help us gather some information for our assignments.
We’ve seen a lot in Munich and Nuremberg – the Glockenspiel in Marienplatz, where little cuckoo clock figures come out and dance for the crowd at 11 a.m., noon and 5 p.m. every day, and the Nuremberg courthouse where the Allies came together after World War II to try Nazi war criminals in the first International War Tribunals.
But one of my favorite experiences has to be all the way back on Day 2, when we went on a historical monument tour of Munich. We got to see all of the city’s major memorials to the victims of the Holocaust, which was very fitting as Munich is seen as the capital of the Nazi movement. One of my favorite monuments, on which I wrote a paper for one of our assignments, was the Place for Victims of National Socialism, where an eternal flame burns bright, caged meters above the ground for tourists and locals to walk past and remember. In the same square, a monument in German honors victims of the Holocaust, remembering those who were murdered for religious, sexual or social affiliation. It’s a nice place of remembrance, but it also poses a lot of questions, as I observed people rushing through the square on their way to work, home or to run errands. It makes you think about the balances between remembering and forgetting the Holocaust and where Munich and all of Germany stands on the matter – which is basically what this whole Dialogue is about. I love this monument because while it’s a beautiful tribute to the victims, it’s location also makes you wonder how we should go about remembering the Holocaust.
Among the memorials and historic tours, we’ve also had some other fun excursions as a group, including a short afternoon Berlin boat cruise and a day out at Neuschwanstein Castle. The castle is located two hours south of Munich, almost touching the Austrian border, and is the inspiration behind many Disney castles. We spent the day there as a group taking a bike tour of the area, stopping for a swim in the lake, having a picnic lunch and finally taking a tour of the castle way up on a hill. It was an awesome way to bond with everyone in our group – changing together into bathing suits in the woods will really do that to you.
