The Focus- Issue 2

ADVENTURES IN BERLIN J . SPENCE & B . WALKER For a few days at the beginning of March, the Year 12 History students visited Berlin on a school trip as part of our studies of the Cold War. Here are some impressions of a few of the sites which we visited: arranged in a grid pattern, jut out of the ground across a sloping plain which is located just one block away from the Brandenburger Tor. We were encouraged to develop our own impressions of what the memorial meant to us as we walked among these concrete slabs. Although the slabs at the edge of the J . Spence: Our walking tour plain are relatively short, the through Berlin, on the first day, further you walk into the took us to the Memorial of the memorial, the higher they grow ‘Murdered Jews of Europe’, up around you, until you designed by American architect become overwhelmed and Peter Eisenman and British disorientated by the height of engineer Buro Happold, which the grey pillars – yet still the was inaugurated in 2005 to ground slopes down towards mark sixty years since the end the centre, directing you away of WWII. Over 2,000 from the outside and propelling rectangular concrete slabs you towards the lowest point of 35