# 2: Berlin.

This post is about the beginning of our trip to northern Germany, but I did not write it until a week later, for two reasons: I didn’t have time to write; and it was too emotionally intense. You would not have liked anything I would have written then. I am going to write a post that is not a travel guide to Berlin, but a reaction to my experiences there.  

A lot of people who have been to Berlin say they love it. I did not love it (I am not a big city kind of person, and Berlin is a huge, sprawling city), but I did go to many very meaningful places, and will tell you about them. Warning: my time in Berlin was spent mostly at World War II/Nazi era-, and Communist era-related sites. So if you are either not a history buff AT ALL, or don’t want to get sad, don’t read this post.

Here is a partial list of the places I went to in my 3 full days there. Donald joined me at many of them.

*The Berlin Wall and the Death Zone.  The Death Zone (also called the Dead Zone) is called that because if you were caught in it, you were shot dead. It is also called that because in many places, it was stripped, denuded of any and all grass, trees, shrubs, so as to give the East German guards clear sight. Today, many of these areas are being turned into gardens and parks; on the outskirts of the city, where West Berlin met the rest of East Germany, some Death Zone areas were not as carefully denatured, and have become park-like on their own. The Berliners have decided to maintain a system of Green Zones that are being built on the old Death Zones. Here is the new park that is in front of our hotel, and runs from Postdamer Platz (more on that later) to the end of "our" street, which is about where the Berlin Wall turned one of its many corners; the American sector would have been on the outside of the Wall here and around the corner. These photos give you a good sense of how freaking wide the Death Zone was in many places.  The greenway here is a raised area, used by many young people for picnicking and socializing. By the way, these images give you some sense of how long and wide the boulevards are, which means walking anywhere can be a serious endeavor. Our hotel is the building at the end of the street on the left-hand side of the photo.

In this photo you can just make out the red lettering of our hotel sign, Scandia.

What we call The Wall was actually a layering of two up-to-15-foot high walls, with, in between them, barbed-wire and razor-wire fencing, mines, lookout posts, high-intensity lights, a “road” wide enough for GDR guards to drive from lookout post to lookout post, and a wide, empty, denuded strip of East German land on which all this sat. Our hotel would have been inside the East German side and close to the GDR-side wall. Outside the layers of wall would have been the American sector.

These are the buildings across the new park, across from our hotel. 

 

These buildings with the amazing architecture were all built since 2001. Until then, the entire area had remained an undeveloped wasteland, even on the West Berlin side. created by Allied bombing and by the Battle for Berlin. Before the War, it had been a busy, bustling area. To see photos of the area, especially the main plaza at the OTHER end of "our" street, Potsdamer Platz., before the War and after  re-development in the 2000s, just search Potsdamer Platz in Google Images. 

To see photos of the Potsdamer Platz area at the end of the War and during the Cold War, just search in Google Images for Potsdamer Platz post War.

I, and later, we, walked along many parts of the Wall and of the Death Zone. Thankfully, while the Berlin people tore down almost the entire Wall, they have left marked on the ground where the Wall used to be, so one can see how the city was divided. 

Also, there are numerous memorials, where parts of the Wall have been left standing on their old sites.

These Wall segments are exactly where they would have been, in Potsdamer Platz.

·      *  A large-scale panorama of The Wall, painted from numerous photographs taken from different angles in West Berlin, showing life on both sides of The Wall. This exhibit is extremely well-done, and includes additional photos. Worth seeing.

·      

One segment of the huge panorama, looking from the West Berlin side to the East Berlin side. When you go up to the image of the Wall, it is life-sized, and you are the same size as any human figures on the West Berlin side. It's quite amazing.

      *Brandenburg Gate, a huge tourist draw. 

  After The Wall was built, neither side could access the Gate. It was in the Death Zone. The British controlled the sector on the West Berlin side.  The Brandenburg Gate connects the Tiergarten (it turns out this word means “garden of beasts,” because it was an old hunting ground/forest centuries ago) with the wide avenue called Unter den Linden, Under the Lindens (trees). This boulevard today has—near the Gate—the American, French, Swedish, and Russian embassies (the Russian one is an entire city block, and is right next door to the city’s snazziest historic hotel, the Hotel Ablon. Think what you will, but I would want a bug-sweep before I stayed there). Around the first corner, on Wilhelmstrasse (more on this later, when I can solidify my nerves to write about it), are the British and the Czech embassies. Just past the Gate was the French sector, which is where the Reichstag building (old seat of power, new seat of the combined government of Germany) sits. A fire within the Reichstag building gave Hitler the excuse to begin mass arrests of communists (he blamed the fire on them). It was heavily damaged in Allied bombing, and sat that way, literally just a few feet outside the Berlin Wall, until that Wall came down and the 2 Germanies were unified, when it was re-imagined with its cool glass dome on top.

·      * Memorials for the murdered Jews of Europe,  

(This photo is from the web, and shows the claustrophobic sense of isolation when one is within the memorial)

t

e   Roma and Sinti (a subgroup of Roma), 

(inside the memorial is a black-bottomed pond with e small fountain in the center. Around the pond are bricks fixed into the stones, with the names of the dozens of concentration camps that Roma and Sinti people were sent to and died/were murdered in),

    

h    homosexuals (this somewhat odd memorial consists of a gray concrete box with a short projected film of men kissing), people who were shot dead while attempting to escape over The Wall, (these take the form of crosses mounted on fencing, withe names of some of the people who are known to have been shot while trying to escape), a beautiful and moving sculpture of a mother cradling her dead soldier-son, which is an anti-war memorial ,

     and, finally, a large memorial, part of a mass burial ground, for the thousands of Soviet-Russian and Ukraine-soldiers killed in the Battle for Berlin.  The following website has a detailed description of the battle, including the tactics and movements on both the Soviet and German sides. It, along with the information provided on the plaques at the memorial, make for a truly horrific read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Berlin

The memorial was built within the British sector, and the Brits respectfully took care of it after the Wall was constructed, including allowing the Soviets access to it for special memorials. After the Wall came down, it was returned to the Russians. 

Some things I learned from this website and from the emotionally intense memorial to the Soviet soldiers include: the political Nazi leadership of Germany either killed themselves or ran, like cowards, at the end; however, they issued orders that the military and the Home Guard, composed primarily of boys and old men, was NOT to surrender under any circumstances, and to therefore allow the destruction of the city and the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. The elite Wehrmacht troops, charged with defending the Chancellory (where Hitler killed himself), at the end staged a mass escape, trying to break through Soviet lines in order to surrender to the Americans rather than the Soviets (the Russians and Ukrainians were vengeful, furious, and vicious to the Germans as they occupied German soil. They had themselves lost over 25 million people to the War, and had been murdered as military and civilian prisoners of the Germans, worked to death defined as subhuman. No one in fascist Europe wanted to surrender to the Soviets). Very few made it through the Soviet lines; those who did manage to get out of the city ran into Soviet troops outside it.

The following website is of images of the Battle of Berlin. 

https://www.google.com/search?q=battle+for+berlin&es_sm=91&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=bceEU_W1IJOS7AbemID4Ag&ved=0CDgQsAQ&biw=1093&bih=479

·       *The Stasi Museum. This is not to be confused with the Stasi Prison, which I/we did NOT get to. The exhibit shows how, when it became apparent the Communist GDR regime was collapsing, the Stasi began shredding documents, and many East Berlin citizens rushed the Stasi offices to rescue the documents. Since then, they have been working to recover the shredded materials, in addition to saving and releasing the rescued records. The museum highlights the files of a number of individuals who were spied on, arrested, persecuted by the Stasi, and what happened to them. It shows clips from Stasi films of people they distrusted (church-goers, young hippies, punks, “bums,” athletes, academics), and describes other spying techniques. A chilling visit.

·       *The Tiergarten, which is oh so, so, so beautiful. 

      A forested parkland, very, very large, that runs, on the north side, from Brandenburg Gate, down past the architecturally-interesting new government buildings, past embassies and more museums, past…… On its southern side, it begins at Potsdammer Platz. Tiergarten Strasse used to be lined with mansions, including ones that high-up Nazi officials lived in. They came on the market cheap when the Jews who had owned some of them either fled or were arrested. One of the mansions was where the plan to first sterilize, and then murder, physical and mental "defectives" was first put into operation. In building their "super race" of humans, Nazi philosophy defined anyone who, they argued, could not contribute to The German Nation (this included people they defined as "too lazy" to work) as subhuman, and thus unfit for survival. Slavic peoples, Jews, Roma, physically and mentally handicapped people, homosexuals, those with mental illness, all fit into this category. They could not be "real" Germans. 

      The mansions along the Tiergarten were destroyed by bombing, or, if they had survived bombing raids, by the final battle.

This gorgeous park has a wide avenue running up its middle, and a central plaza, which is also a traffic circle, with a huge monument in it. I’m not going to bother with the history of this monument, etc (although it’s cool that I saw it from the plane as we were flying into Berlin, and wondered what it was, as it stood out so much), other than to say that Hitler had this avenue reconfigured so as to be a triumphal avenue for him to ride down, through the Brandenburg Gate, on his way to Imperial Majesty, I guess. He DID see himself as the Emperor of not only his Empire (the Reich), but of Europe (the Third Reich would follow after the First Reich/Empire, which was the Holy Roman Empire (begun by Charlemagne), with the Prussian/German Otto I as the Emperor, about a thousand years ago.  The Second Reich was begun by Bismarck, and ended with Germany's defeat in WW I. At any rate, the reason this sticks with me is because the Memorial to the Soviet Soldiers was purposely placed along this triumphal route, as a sort of middle-finger to the Germans.

The Tiergarten was also the site of absolutely vicious fighting in the final days of The War in Europe. Hand-to-hand fighting, with the entire Tiergarten covered with dead and dying men.  There are thousands of men buried at the Soviet memorial, and thousands more German—and Soviet, both Russian and Ukrainian—soldiers buried in hundreds of cemeteries around Berlin and its outskirts, along with tens of thousands of dead civilians. The final count of the dead will never be known, as they discover more bodies all the time, anytime anyone digs anywhere.

Any trees that were left in the park after the fighting were cut and burned for firewood by the starving people of Berlin. People also grew food on the grounds.

This is what this beautiful park looked like in 1945.

By the way, the Berlin Zoo, which is the subject of another blog, also figures into this story. The zoo is at the very top of the Tiergarten. There was a German flak-tower and large bunker at the zoo, which still had some animals in it, despite having been bombed repeatedly in 1943 by British bombers (by the way, a subject I had never considered before: many, many, many zoo and farm animals and pets were killed in bombings all over Europe, as well as in the Pacific, African, Middle East, and Asian arenas of the War—this was true in the First World War, as well, as in true in most wars.  The large-scale deaths of farm animals are among the reasons famine often follows wars. It is certainly not the same thing as genocide, and certainly not as important as the humans of all nations who suffered terribly and were killed, but it is certainly an aspect of war I had not thought of before. And there is something really awful about animals who cannot comprehend what is happening and who ought to have no part in it….). Many zoos all over Europe were ordered by local authorities to shoot their dangerous animals BEFORE they were bombed, so as to prevent wild animal escapes. Most zoo animals were starving, anyway, as Europe’s zookeepers had been called up to serve. Most of the zoo animals in Berlin were killed, one way or another, and those that had survived up until the final battle either starved to death, were butchered for food, or had to be hunted and shot in the streets, where they had run in terror. Surviving zoo animals were also used for labor.

Zoo animals shot dead.

Dead zebra (while another looks on) at the zoo.

This is one of the elephants killed in a bombing raid.

You can read about it, and also see more photos, at these websites, if you have the stomach for it. Me, I’m going to take a break from this horror for a bit, before telling you about the other Berlin sites I visited.

http://theelephantgate.weebly.com/the-war-comes-to-the-zoo.html

http://www.dirk-petzold.de/zoo_frankfurt.html

Berlin 1.

I want to say something about the Berlin Zoo, but first I will say something about the Dublin zoo.

The last time I was in Dublin, Don was at a conference, and I had 2 full days to myself. Dublin was in the middle of a heat wave—there were sunburned Irish people everywhere—and the only places I wanted to be were the wonderful Irish National Museum, the lovely and shady St. Stephen’s Green (filled with sunbathing Irish people), and, finally desperate for something outside the gritty downtown, the zoo. Dublin’s zoo began as a typical city-zoo, that is to say, hell on earth for the animals. But it is located in a huge urban park, and they decided that since the park gave them plenty of room to expand, and since our knowledge of what makes a zoo a healthy place for animals had expanded, they would similarly expand. And expand they did—what was created was a wonderful zoo, well-designed for both animals and the humans who crave a glimpse of them. The North Carolina zoo is a terrific place for the animals, but one does not always catch sight of them. At the Dublin zoo, the animals have great spaces, lots to do, and privacy if they want it, but the enclosures are designed such that the visiting humans do not go away frustrated. I loved it. I spent much of full day there, and came away happy and in love with the animals I had seen and with the zoo and city authorities, who had designed a place to make both the animals and the visiting humans happy.

Cue my first full day in Berlin. Not being a city person at all, and with Berlin having sunny days in the 80s, I headed out on the city’s wonderful metro system, for the zoo, which is located at the tip of an enormous park, the Tiergarten,  (more on that later). Tiergarten translates as Garden of the Beasts, or Animals. It is not named the Tiergarten because it was a zoo, but because it was originally a hunting preserve for the aristocracy. It just so happens that the zoo was aded onto the top.

And here is a fact: the Berlin city zoo is appalling.  It was like I remember the Bronx zoo being when I was a child: most of the animals in enclosures way too small and boring for them. The first animal I saw was an elephant, and I nearly cried at the awful circumstances she was in. There were a few enclosures that were fairly good—the white Arctic wolves,

the gorillas, 

and the Asiatic tigers, who here have caught the scent of something and are staring hard at whatever it was, 

seemed happy, and had reasonably-sized areas to play and live in—but many of the rest of them were abysmal. Yet there is a huge park they could expand into.  Obviously Berlin has necessarily had other priorities on their collective minds since the War ended, as well as since the Cold War ended, and it makes sense that the zoo would not come first (again, more on this later). But if you are planning to visit that city any time soon, don’t go to the zoo. It will just depress you. 

Here are a brown bear and a polar bear, in their enclosures.

Note: I add to my comments on the zoo during and after the War in a later post.

Two Quick Notes:
Wednesday late evening, May 28th, 2014, Bielefeld

1. Our friend Michelle Budig, who has spent a great deal of time in Germany, had warned us, humorously, of a specific German practice which we have come to understand personally. It turns out that virtually every bathroom here, including every hotel room bathroom and many restaurant bathrooms (all the ones with only one toilet), has a toilet brush in it. That is not so that the person who cleans the bathrooms has a convenient one in each bathroom. That is so that each person can clean up after themselves if needed. After all, no one likes to clean up after other people's ****.  Michelle told us that once she was staying in a hotel in Germany and got yelled at by the woman who cleaned her room, for not using the toilet brush herself. We appreciate being forewarned, as we do not want to be yelled at. It would make us feel too much like our moms were yelling at us.

2. Tomorrow is Ascension Thursday, which has little meaning in this very secular society, but remains a national holiday. It has turned into Fathers' Day (although officially this is now Men's Day), which is a day that gives German men permission (which I think they already have all the time, anyway) to drink, but this time without their mothers or wives complaining, I guess. Everyone tells us it is a holiday because it is the day Christ went up to heaven, but I don't think many of them will go to church.
Since it is a national holiday, ALL stores will be closed. We asked if any museums will be open; the woman at the reception desk downstairs looked it up and told us that the history museum will be open; "it is the museum about the Nazis," she said. We looked at each other. I asked,  "And it will be about the bombings, too?" "Oh, yes," she assured me. We looked at each other again. "Maybe we'll go hiking instead," Don said, and I nodded vigorously.

Trying to get to Berlin.

Don and I arrived in Berlin on Monday night, May 19^th (many of you probably realize that this date is Don’s birthday. Neither he nor I remembered it was his birthday until quite late in the day. You’ll see why in a moment). We were supposed to arrive early Monday morning, Berlin time (with the 6-hour time difference, it would have been 1:00 am for our brains and bodies). Don would have showered and rushed off to his 2-day conference, and I would have napped for a few hours, then gotten outside to let the sunshine help my brain make that time transition, which for some reason has always been quite difficult for me. I have fallen asleep standing up in Notre Dame cathedral many years ago, fallen asleep mid-chew,—this is a great family joke, the time Mom fell asleep with a French fry dangling out her mouth—slept through many a sight-seeing attempt, including, years ago, on the Bateau tour on the Seine, slept soundly in a hotel lobby in Dublin when it was too early for us to get into our room. We have learned the hard way that I need sleep that first day.

Our flight was supposed to leave at 3:00 from DC to Newark, then we had a closely-timed connection to Berlin. Instead, our flight to Newark was simply cancelled. Cancelled. Did airlines used to do this? For no apparent reason? Don received an email on his smart-phone at about 11:30 am from the airline as we were eating brunch with Nicholas in DC, simply saying it had been cancelled and that they had re-booked us on a series of flights, still beginning on Sunday, that would have gotten us to Berlin on….Tuesday night. By Tuesday night, we would have missed the entire and only reason we were going to Berlin: the 2-day conference. Not to mention that in the time they were going to take to get us there, we could have gone to Australia. Except for the cost, of course. Maybe we should just have demanded that they rebook us to Australia. Oh, Don’s grant is to work with the EU. Sigh.

Anyway, needless to say, the airline’s plan was not going to work. Don then spent the entire brunch on the phone (I rarely say this, but thank God for smart-phones. Without one, we would not have known our flight was cancelled until we got to the airport and checked in) with the airline, trying to find a set of flights that would work better than the existing plan. Finally, we got booked on a flight to Brussels, leaving DC at about 4:20 pm, and then connecting to Berlin. We would arrive in Berlin at about 11:00 a.m., so Don would miss the morning conference sessions, but after a shower, he could at least be there by mid-afternoon.

We had gained some additional free time with Nicholas, so we went to Arlington National Cemetery, which he and Don had never been to, and I had last visited in about 1968.  I’m not sure what else to say about it other than that such a place fills me with both thankfulness towards the men and women who have sacrificed their lives, their health, their sanity, their limbs, in service of their country, their comrades, and the people of the world, and with a profound anti-war sentiment.  We were glad we went.  I suspect that this visit to our nation's hallowed ground helped shape my thoughts and reactions once I arrived in Germany. Knowing what wars cost, and thinking about those costs, as well as why and when they might be necessary, put me in a particularly emotional frame of mind.

Nick then dropped us off at the airport, and we proceeded to wait…and wait….and wait….and wait….for our flight to leave for Brussels. By the time we boarded for the 7-hour flight, we knew we had missed our connection in Brussels.  We left DC at around 8:30 pm (4 hours late), and when we got to Brussels, discovered that only 2 flights per day leave from there for Berlin. It was by now about 3:30 am in our brains and bodies, although it was 9:30 am in Western Europe. We had 2^nd breakfast, then lunch, while we waited for our late afternoon flight to leave. At about 2:00 pm local time (so about 8:00 am body-and-brain time), Don checked Facebook, and saw a bunch of Happy Birthday greetings, and so was reminded that it was his birthday! Don’t worry, I got him a card while I was out and about in Berlin that evening!

We got to our hotel in time for him to take a hurried shower, change clothes, and dash to the conference dinner, at which he arrived late. I, although looking longingly at the bed, headed out into the evening summer sunshine—quite bright in mid-May—to gawk at the incredible nearby architecture and find supper (and a birthday card). Thus we spent the first day of Don’s 2-day conference in the Brussels airport.

Introduction to our Travel Blog for May-June 2014. Written May 28^th 2014

This blog as I am writing it so far is very much a set of reactions to some of my experiences and to many of the places we are visiting.  I confess I never had an urge to travel to Germany, as I still held the German people responsible for the terrible genocide, and the massively, insanely destructive war that was perpetrated in their name, and for the madness that gripped them for a decade and a half from the early 1930s through the mid-1940s. This trip is teaching me a few things that I want to say right from the start:

-Human beings in general seem to be capable of doing terrible things to each other, of denying other people their humanity, of vicious cruelty and vicious apathy (as when we hear that bombs have exploded in some other country, that 400 people were killed or injured, and we continue eating our dinner as if nothing important has happened. Or worse, when we support policies that we know will result in OTHER people dying, not our own family members or our own citizens, and don’t care). The German people of the 1930s-40s are not alone in being complicit in great evil, or of apathy, or, what was probably more common, in great fear. The only difference between them and us is that their leaders during that time were madmen who created a government and policing apparatus that encouraged rule by bullies, thugs, and psychopaths.  Politics that encourage people to hatred, rage, the dehumanization of others, and irrationality will always give rise to, and power to, bullies.  It is much too easy to imagine our own country going down this same route. The groups being dehumanized may not be the same ones,  but the ugly results could too easily be the same. Whenever I hear a politician use an expression like "The REAL America," I shudder. The Nazis ruled that only "Real Germans" could vote, hold jobs, receive pensions earned, reproduce, and, ultimately, live. The first step in stripping others of their rights is deciding that their differences make them less than you.

-It is too easy for me to imagine what it was like to be a wife and mother, whose husband is away at war or possibly dead; whose teenaged son and elderly father have been called up to defend, at all costs, the city; whose younger children are—along with myself—traumatized by night and day bombing; whose home, neighborhood, and city are in smoldering ruins, with the smell of death everywhere; where basic utilities such as clean water, sewer, electricity, all communication technologies, have ceased to operate; where there is no food; whose government has completely collapsed, including all police systems; and where there are angry, vengeful enemy soldiers arriving who are raping and beating. Such a woman does not know if her young son and elderly father are alive, or are dying, or maybe she does know the worst. Such a woman knows that no matter how much she wants to lay her head down and die, she must feed her younger children and protect her daughters and herself as best she can.

For this woman, no matter how complicit she may have been in supporting, even enthusiastically, her despotic, insane, genocidal government, I can feel great pity, great sorrow, and affinity. I cannot focus anymore on holding her partially responsible, even if she was. I can only recognize her terror, her utter despair, and her courage in NOT laying her head down and dying. In the past I have only thought of the European survivors of German aggression and genocidal policies: Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Brits, Danes, Dutch, Greeks; anywhere that was bombed, that saw reprisals, that had people rounded up. Now I can see the survivors, the children born into such a burning, destroyed world, as the same.

-I also realize in a deeper way than I did before the terrible cost to decency that reprisals must bring. It is one thing to think that, as an individual, one could risk certain torture and death if caught fighting, or even protesting, an evil system. It is quite a totally different thing to know that one could bring the same torture and death to one’s family, to one’s entire village, to neighbors, to strangers. So I have to ask myself if I would protest, knowing I would bring death or at least persecution down on others in reprisal. We will never know how many Germans (and French, Spanish, Slovaks, Croatians, Romanians, and Italians, to list most of the other complicit Fascist nations of the time) disagreed with and hated what was happening in their country, but lacked courage for themselves or could not bring themselves to cause reprisals for others. This goes for those living under Communism, as well.

-In traveling, as usual, one learns many new things (or one ought to), and some of the new things I have learned have been about even older wars, ones I have known little of. For example: the Thirty Years’ War (first half of the 1600s), which involved most of the countries of Europe, and resulted in the absolute devastation of much of Central Europe, in epidemics, in famines, in the denuding of natural environments, in the loss of almost half of all German males and the reduction of the populations of involved Central European nations on the order of 30-40%. Wikipedia says, re: the marauding armies of mercenary soldiers who caused much of the destruction, “The Swedish armies alone may have destroyed up to 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns.”

 Another example: The 7-Years War of the 1750s-1760s (known in the U.S. by the distinctly local name The French and Indian War), which was literally a World War, so much that it is called The First World War by historians. It was a war over empires,  and, again, quoting Wikipedia,  “It involved most of the great powers of the time and affected Europe, North America, Central America, the West African coast, India, and the Philippines………..The war was characterized in Europe by sieges and arson of towns as well as open battles involving extremely heavy losses; overall, some 900,000 to 1,400,000 people died.”

My point is that humanity—or at least the leadership of some countries—seems to go insane periodically; sometimes, when the “great powers” are sort of behaving rationally and not involved in terrible crimes against humanity, OTHER nations engage in orgies of brutality and/or genocide: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Serbia and Croatia, the Siege of Sarajevo. , etc, etc.

Recognizing this about humanity, I cannot continue to blame today’s Germany for its past. What I can do is remind us all of our tremendous responsibility in resisting the rage, irrationality of our own place and time, and the rise of bullies in the political and media spheres. Anytime bullies are glorified and empowered is a dangerous time.

So, I want to warn you that some of these posts are not fun to read, as they are my response to my surroundings, surroundings that for me are filled with emotional reactions of many sorts. The Third Reich and the Soviet-Communist era are too central to the history of most of the 20^th century to pretend they didn’t exist, or to ignore them when surrounded by reminders. I am personally hoping that by the time I have been here more than I have been so far (I am writing this on my ninth full day here), I will be ready to move on to new topics. I am sure most of you will be ready for that, as well. J