Beyond Berlin

              Friday was an interesting free day. Liz and I went to the Max Planck institute in Potsdam so that she could give a presentation on the research she is working on with Dr. Lvov. 

              Her presentation was good and the facilities, which we got to tour around a bit, were impressive. The research group with whom Dr. Lvov is connected were extremely nice and extremely understated about some very impressive work being done there. We had lunch there at the cafeteria with them and then caught a train back to Potsdam where we got in some shopping. I was glad to have a bit of a different experience that morning, history and architecture are awesome but we’ve been completely saturated with them for the last two weeks so a little brain redirection didn’t hurt anything. Friday night we went out to celebrate Liz’s successful presentation. We explored the club scene in Schoneberg, former home to the amazing David Bowie. It was a fantastic night.

                Saturday morning we met the group on the bus to begin the Greater Germany excursion! Our first destination was Dessau. There resides the Bauhaus, design institute. It’s an impressive building, designed with modernity and utility in mind. They also design a great number of fascinating chairs there, some ugly, some interesting, some comfortable, some less so. The tour of the buildings was very informative, our tour guide covered all topic from details of design to historical references. She showed pictures of the various stage of the building over time and the uses to which it was put during various eras of its history. Hitler for instance changed it to a very different sort of education, including stereotypical womanly skills for girls. We also visited the Master’s houses, designed for the teachers a ways from campus. 

Then it was back to the bus for the trip to Nuremburg, where I crashed for the night.

                The morning in Nuremburg was exciting because it’s a medieval town and that’s exactly what we were exploring. I went to a few of the oldest churches and the Nuremburg Castle! The three major churches were  Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), built  between 1352 and 1362; St. Sebaldus Church, built in the 1230s; and St. Lorenz, built in 1445. And the Castle, the oldest parts of which are from 1140, is just fantastic. I love its massive walls and tower. Also, offers a great view of the medieval part of the city.

                In the afternoon  we switched from knights, kings, and priests to Nazis. We visited the Rally grounds of the Nazi party and the recently built museum. The scale of everything is, very purposefully, colossal. You do feel very small and inferior, as Hitler would have wanted you to. Everything is modeled off of classical symbols of power, from the Coliseum to the Pergamon. The museum was designed to be in the main building which would have been a sort of political building upon completion. The design is like a shard of glass piercing through the closed off imposing power of the Nazi architecture. The architect said that he created this design based upon personal experiences. His father had been a “good Nazi” and he had asked him what it was like during the third reich and what he had done. His father completely shut him down and refused to talk. He saw it as important to talk about such things and he saw the harsh façade of this building (the strong granite concealing the hidden brick behind) as a shell very like his father’s shell. It was something he wanted to break through to the truth. The museum would be the truth. This I feel is completely brilliant and well done. One of the coolest architectural designs I’ve seen on this trip.

                The rest of the grounds are also on this massive scale, we walked up the huge parade street and to the actual area where the rallies were held. Some people stood on the area where Hitler himself addressed the crowd.

              We learned about the unbelievable show put on there from workers to hitler youth to dancing ladies to an insane “cathedral of light” which was literally visible from the Czech Republic. This combine with the museum did an amazing job of teaming one of the most vital and I think often forgotten lessons of World War II. It’s very easy to remember the holocaust and think of the Nazi party as obvious devils. One’s first thought tends towards complete confusion as to how anyone ever let Hitler get in power or supported him. You almost want to assume that he was just some demon who came up out of hell and overthrew the German government. But the fact is that he was elected and took all of his power by legal means. Further the people supported him completely. What this museum was able to do was to show why people supported him. It talked about his rise to power and the terrible economic and political circumstances Germany was in. It talked about his amazing oratory skills and the “cult of hitler.” It showed all of the lies and charades and impressive accomplishments he used to sway his people. He was, while also evil, completely brilliant. He had it all planned from the architecture to the press to the film propaganda. People in Germany had little knowledge of the mass extermination of Jews; what they knew about was this great speaker who could make them feel like their nation was something important and their cause was something worth fighting for. If the lesson of remembering the World War II and the holocaust is to make sure it never happens again, then it is absolutely vital to see that this isn’t just some insane happening which came out of the blue. It was a planned deceit which everyday people could theoretical fall for. The lesson is to think for yourself, really look at what is going on around you, and never shy away from defending the basic human rights of everyone.

                This (Monday) morning we got the flip side, Dachau. Here one sees all of the absolutely revolting things going on behind the massive waving banners and speeches. The camp is deeply disturbing to put it mildly. I literally cannot put into words what it is like to walk into that crematorium. Your skin crawls. You feel slightly sick. And everything takes on this air of the surreal, as if your mind is more comfortable looking at things from a textbook than processing them as things which really happened to real people right where you are standing. I had this illogical desire to tread lightly, as if I were hoping to keep from stepping on the piles of corpses from the past. I cannot say anything else on this topic.

                The afternoon took us to the BMW Welt (World) and the Olympic Park. The BMW museum is amusing, with an area inside where you can buy a car and then drive down a ramp in the middle of everything and then out of the building. They also had an adorable tiny BMW.

                The Olympic Park is lovely. The grounds are fantastic: beautiful grass, trees, lake. The structures are pretty cool. The design has these massive waves of metal and glad suspended on huge metal poles. The whole thing looks hanging fabric. It looks almost like tents, giving the entire grounds a festive carnival sort of feel. Also, we found baby swans and they aren’t ugly at all, they’re adorable.