Berlin with the Dutchies

I sometimes refer to my Dutch friends as Dutchies since saying "the Dutch people" is a mouthful. Yesterday, we returned from a week long class field trip to Berlin, Germany.

We visited 3-5 monuments, memorials, art and history museums a day. I would describe Berlin as not a very attractice city with a lot to do. There is a fierce abundance of gray, concrete and steel. My class is studying the different dimensions of the Cold War and so visiting Germany was a logical extension of our studies. To see East Berlin, Potsdam, pieces of the Wall and Berlin itself was fantastic.

Among other Berlin highlights, my class visited a section of the Berlin wall that is still standing and has been turned into a memorial and painted by artists from around the world. My fourteen classmates walked the city from end to end, our miles on foot supplemented by use of the train with our week-long public transportation pass. From the windows we saw wonderful murals and street art.

Pictures of the Berlin Wall (decorated by artists)

:









Most of the sights we saw--the DDR Museum, the Stasi Museum (the Stasi were the Ministry of State Security in East Germany, modeled after the violent KGB of Russia)and displays at the Germany History Museum-- revolved around Cold War events. When we were not seeing events dealing with Cold War oppression in a divided Germany, we were retracing the horrors of the Holocaust. Berlin is a city that refuses to forget. It has erected monuments, memorials and museums--like the Jewish History Museum--that confront a bloody history.

What I liked best about the Berlin trip was not Berlin. The city--the one from which my grandmother on my mom's side fled with her parents when she was three in 1933--makes me sick. And grateful. If my great-parents had not had the foresight to leave when they had (we are Jewish) then I would not be here. Berlin is a city of open spaces--architecturally. I felt a lot of hollow spaces inside metaphorically while I was there, too. The things I liked the best were moments that took me away from the beaded handbag with a swastika on it in the natural history museum: friends, music and art.

1. Friends
What I adore about my classmates is that I can talk to anyone for almost any amount of time and not get bored. Though we had a few talkers on board--people that talk like machines with no natural stopping point, there was not the cult of snobbery that seems to inflict many American youth. The national Dutch value of embracing the collective instead of the individual is manifest in the students who I have come to know and befriend. If they see you walking somewhere alone, they will ask, do you want me to come with you. If there are not enough chairs at a table for you, they will push together tables to make room. Are cliques an American invention? The ego does not seem as important to the Dutch as to Americans. They are not concerned with being right 100% of the time, they care more about the discussion, more about nuance. They don’t seem to see everything in black and white (as I often do) they think in more shaded terms (their political system has many, many parties, in America we have two main parties which can lead to people always thinking in a binary instead of a multiplicity of ways.)

Dinner and friends:





2. Music

The hostel we stayed in was within walking distance of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra,(Berliner Philharmoniker) under the direction of Hans Adler. One evening, my class decided to split up (we usually ate dinner together in sundry restaurants.) Upon departing from the train at ten til' eight p.m I saw crowds of people shuffling towards the Orchestra. I walked a few moments in the opposite direction towards the hostel we were staying in. Then, I pivoted and turned around. I'm going the wrong direction, I told myself, and gleefully followed the crowds into the concert hall building, where I inquired into whether any student tickets were still available. The ticket was only ten euros and I had prime seats, middle and center. The concert hall was bowl-shaped, with seats rising up from all sides. In the middle was a small floor with the piano where I listened, enchanted. For the next two hours I enjoyed the works of French concert pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. When I bought the ticket I did not know who or what was playing. It became a night of extraordinary music by the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, Chopin and Wagner (and a request for Brahms from a member of the audience.) I could not stop watching Thibaudet's fingers flit and fly across the keys. Two hours felt like forty minutes.

3. Art
My favorite art experience in Berlin was seeing the studio of Werner Brunner(b 1941). This visit was organized by my great professor, Joes Segal in our class on the Cold War. Werner Brunner's Studio: