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 J . Spence: Our walking tour through Berlin, on the first day, took us to the Memorial of the ‘Murdered Jews of Europe’, designed by American architect Peter Eisenman and British engineer Buro Happold, which was inaugurated in 2005 to mark sixty years since the end of WWII. Over 2,000 rectangular concrete slabs slabs at the edge of the plain are relatively short, the further you walk into the memorial, the higher they grow up around you, until you become overwhelmed and disorientated by the height of the grey pillars – yet still the ground slopes down towards the centre, directing you away from the outside and propelling you towards the lowest point of

this memorial, the centre, perhaps representative of the constant escalation of the Third Reich’s persecution of the Jews. As soon as the lowest point is reached, the ground begins to slope up again and your focus is drawn to the edge of the memorial. Although you may feel utterly engulfed in the centre of the memorial, a path will always lead you safely out again, just as the human race has learnt from the atrocities committed in the holocaust. The lasting feeling I got from walking through the memorial was how uniform the blocks were – there was no sense of individuality or identity. The diverse people remembered here were persecuted because of the religion which they happened to share – yet, in the eyes of those in power, the fact that they were Jewish was the only thing that mattered about them, and throughout their persecution, their individual differences were disregarded and their religion became their defining (and in this case incriminating) feature.

B . Walker: After the guided walking tour of Berlin, we stopped off at the Reichstag, which was the seat of the ‘Bundestag’ or the German National Parliament. We visited the amazing 360 degree glass dome atop the building, with picturesque views of Berlin lit up in the twilight. It was amazing to think that we were at the centre of political decision making of a country. Across the view, we were enthralled by the sites steeped in history, like the Berlin Zoological Gardens and the Brandenburg Gate, but we were also entranced by the modernism that Berlin invited, like the Ludwig-Erhard-Haus.

Taking in the sights, it was clear that Berlin was where the past, present and future all collide.

J . Spence: A guided tour of the Stasi Museum, housed in the former headquarters of the East German State Security Service, provided a fascinating insight into the lengths to which this organisation went in order to gather information about the huge number of citizens on which it was spying, totalling more than a third of the East German population. Such was the secrecy with which they did this, that it wasn’t until long after the fall of communism in Europe, that one family living in former East Berlin decided to install a new door in their house and discovered the Stasi had been spying on them.

Noticing some strange metal objects poking out of the top of the old door which they had just removed from the doorframe, they chipped away at the door to reveal a bugging device and several batteries hidden in the cavity inside the door. Such bugging devices could be skilfully installed in

people’s homes by a Stasi employee – precautions had to be taken to ensure that they would not be caught redhanded by one of the members of the household returning home. Of course, this required yet more covert activity – whilst the Stasi’s full-time employees and unofficial collaborators alone made up nearly 2% of the East German population, many more gave information to the organisation without knowing they had done so. In order to find out when would be the best time to install a bugging device in someone’s home, it was common for a Stasi employee to dress up as a

postman and knock on a the door of a target’s neighbour, to enquire when their neighbour was likely to be home from work so that a parcel could be delivered to them. Whilst the neighbour providing this information remained ignorant of the malicious purpose it would serve, the Stasi employee could now be sure of the best time to break into the target’s house and install a bugging device. Although, as the German Democratic Republic fell, Stasi employees did attempt to destroy a lot of the files that they had kept on people, the vast majority still remain intact in an archive on the same site, and people have been working continuously since 1995 to piece together the files which were shredded – the archive holds an astonishing 111 kilometres of files in total. Since 1992, it has been possible for citizens to see their own files in the archive, and some 2.75 million people did so in the first ten years of the archives being open. Many of those who have been to read their files have discovered a harrowing truth – that members of their immediate family and their close friends, whom they thought they could trust, had been passing information about them on to the Stasi; for fear of discovering the same, many Germans have chosen not to visit the archives. It seems that in this system obsessed with ultimate control, the informers truly were everywhere.

B . Walker: The last stop of our visit was an introspective one. After whizzing around Berlin for a good 6-7 hours each day for the past week, it was a curious change in tone to have a quiet afternoon of deep thought. We visited the Sachsenhausen Concentration

Camp in Oranienburg, which had primarily been used to hold political prisoners during the Third Reich. Walking around the starkly silent site, it was unsettling to think of the past horrors which had taken place right beneath our feet; as we continued through the maze of out houses and barren landscapes, the time for contemplation was overwhelming, as if there was an underlying sense of malice in the air that we could all collectively sense. It was especially striking to think about the volume of people who would have stood exactly where we were standing, feeling a far worse mix of emotions, shrouding their uncertain futures. I was thankful that I had the opportunity to visit such a place, and was able to truly understand what a place like that meant to me.