The Littlest Things

Hi out there! Sorry for not posting recently; I have several presentations to give starting Monday, so I’ve been focusing on them, since everything needs to be in good German.

Anyway, I had the good fortune to make two almost back-to-back trips to Berlin and Potsdam, once with last year’s German FLA, Hannah, and the other with the school.

Berlin is a great city, and I spent a full day simply walking around the city and seeing things like the Brandenburger Tor, the several museums on Berlin’s so-called “Museum Island”, Checkpoint Charlie, and more. Especially interesting was the Holocaust Memorial, because unlike most memorials, it’s honestly just a whole bunch of pillars stuck in the ground. But the feeling of walking through the pillars on a cold November day had more of an effect on me than any other memorial except the Vietnam Memorial in D.C. It is easy not to look at the pillars at the edges of the memorial, because many of them are not even waist high, but what they hide is actually a depression in the ground, and suddenly the pillars are more than a foot over your head, and your vision is narrowed to just the far-off “window” that is made directly in front of you by the over-arching pillars, which are only about one “me” wide at any given point. The overall feeling of walking through the memorial was actually quite lonely, even though I was there with the group from Bamberg.

Well didn’t this turn out to be a nice post? I’ll write about Potsdam soon, I promise!

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