I have been to Berlin before, but it was a long time ago. A time when I was too young, too inexperienced, too full of midwestern naïveté to see the echoes of history that lurked among the glass and steel. Then, my eyes were wide with the profound differentness of it, and I confess to spending more time worrying about what was happening at home than breathing in the moments that were happening there.
I viewed the city with different eyes this time, although I believe that Berlin has also, in many ways, become a different city as well.
Every year students ask me what Germans think about the Holocaust today, but I never have an answer for them. I knew only what I knew- which wasn't much. I recalled being moved to tears at a small museum near Brandenburg Gate filled with pictures drawn and painted by the children of Theresienstadt- children who were likely already orphaned as they waited (please, God, unknowingly) for their own cattle car ride toward ash and smoke. I dimly recall a memorial or two, but my visit then wasn't marked by Holocaust remembrance, and my long term memory simply didn't note anything else.
This year when the inevitable question is asked, I will have an answer. Germany has chosen to embrace their history, sorrow and all, rather than relegate it to a place where people can only whisper about it behind palms cupped to hold the words close to their source.
Today in the very center of Berlin, just a block or so away from the site of Hitler's final bunker, holds the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. A sea of gray stiles, row upon row, stretches away from the eye- an unmistakable reminder. The Jewish Museum resides down the street- a testament to the history and culture of the Jewish population that was virtually decimated under Nazi reign. Memorials and plaques are around corner after corner after corner- proof that Germans, too, have a stake in owning and preserving the history- however heartbreaking- of all the people who called Germany home.
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