Benny Ben in Europe: Berlin

As I mentioned in my last post, we took a school trip to Berlin this last week. We were unbelievably busy for the four days that we were there. We would start touring as a group in the morning and finish late in the afternoon, when our teachers would set us free to explore on our own. We toured, as a group, the Berlin Wall Memorial, the Reichstag (Parliament), the Bundeskanzlermat (Chancellery), the Deutsche Bahn (German rail conglomerate), the ZDF-Hauptstadtstudio (major German news/tv network), the Berlin-Hohenschoenhausen Memorial (memorial located at a former east Berlin Stasi prison), and the Charlottenburg Palace and Garden. We also took a group boat tour down the Spree river which runs through the heart of Berlin.

After we were done as a group, we (the usual suspects) would head straight for another museum or attraction. Most museums close at 6 which didn't leave us much time to physically get to them, let alone have enough time to thoroughly look through them, but we managed fairly well. We visited the Olympic Stadium built by Hitler for the 1936 summer games where Jesse Owens dominated the podium, winning gold in the 100m, 200m, long jump, and the team 4x100m.

We also visited the German History Museum one evening, this was one of the cases where we didn't have much time to look through it. We managed to make it through the first floor which consisted of the beginning of Germany's history through 1918. The museum had a very interesting section on World War I. I haven't seen many artifacts from the Great War, and it was especially interesting to see a German perspective on it. I think the German History Museum was my favorite of all the places we visited in Berlin. I was a little sad that I didn't get to see the portion on World War II, but I think I am going to be ok.

Before this trip, I never really understood the true nature of what it had meant to live in East Berlin or East Germany for that matter. I was born just a few months before the wall fell, which means that for as long as I can remember, there has only been a "Germany" and not a divided country. Of course, throughout my time in school I have leanerd about the division of the Germany after World War II and the subsequent Cold War. However, I never really thought about what life must have been like in the East, until our group visited the Hohenschoenhausen prison memorial.

The Hohenschoenhausen prison lies deep within former East Berlin, amongst high-rise communist designed apartment buildings and run-down, vacant factories. The prison was run by the Stasi. The Stasi were the secret police of East Germany, Stasi stood for the "shield and sword of the party" referring to the SED, which was the ruling party of East Germany. The prison's purpose was to detain people who were against anything to do with the DDR. Except the Stasi didn't just detain them, they also tortured them, and for the most part, the majority of the prisoners who came to Hohenschoenhause were guilty of nothing. We toured the torture rooms, prison cells, and interrogation rooms. I instantly realized that the people of East Germany not only had communism forced upon them, but they also had fear and insecurity forced upon them.

While we were at the Berlin Wall Memorial, Travis asked our tour guide "When did the East realize they were not going to succeed as a country?"

Our tour guide responded, "The moment they began putting the wall up, because a truly safe and secure country doesn't need to wall their citizens in."