20.04.2016

Standing above the “death strip” in between the two sides of what once was the Berlin Wall, looking at the spaces where corpses were uncovered and relocated outside the cemetery walls where the original Church of Reconciliation used to stand, doing my best to take in the fierce amount of pain and suffering involved in the history of this space. The casual and light-hearted manner in which this tour took place was disconcerting–my face flushed with embarrassment as our tour guide cracked jokes about “former Nazis” and the adversity that was endured during the time of the Iron Curtain.

The ability to remove oneself from historical agony and slap a superficial band-aid over the wounds brought about by the latent totalitarianism of this world’s history shocks me, even more so when I find myself dissociating and brushing off the torment that lies before me with thoughts of how hungry or tired I am. This tour was more than a reminder of my placement in the capitalist machine I have come to call home. Even when it feels like we have left the playpen, Big Brother’s gnarled fingers loom in each of our shadows.

18.04.2016

With nothing but honesty in mind, this was by far the most boring and frustrating tour of the most interesting museum that I have yet to experience in my young adult life. While I completely understand the world’s general distaste for Americans, our tour guide’s lack of interest in the group and our ability to comprehend what was being presented to us was nothing if not disheartening. My ability to retain the information he spewed at us took a heavy hit as he compared us to high school students, and was completely shut down upon being asked if we had ever heard of Walter Benjamin.

I left the majority of the museum unexplored due to my frustrations with our guide, and yet I was still able to walk away with at least a slightly better understanding of the history we have studied throughout the past two quarters in class. I wonder how much more I will be able to absorb and appreciate when I return to this museum during my Wanderzeit, hopefully unaccompanied by one of Berlin’s most disparaging and unfavorable museum docents.

13.04.2016

As of yet this was my favorite of the various tours we have taken as a group since arriving in Berlin. Our guide, Evelyn, was an incredibly intuitive wealth of information. Her ability to point out specific tags and posters beyond the stops that were planned by our other guide, Rachel, astonished and inspired me. I could feel the connections she held with each piece she inspected and tackled in the emotion in her voice and the excitement in her face. Her anecdotes about her various experiences with some of the artists whose works we saw opened my eyes to a side of Berlin I had yet to be able to visualize on my own–running from the cops, partying at squats, and assisting different artists with major pieces were just some of the many stories told that day.

The very best part of the tour took place after the group dispersed when I was able to walk around Berlin with Evelyn and Gabby as a group of three. She told us about her experiences as a foreigner (originally from Finland) in Berlin, her encounters with various authority figures in Germany and other European countries, and the dystopia she had found in this strange city we have come to know for the past few weeks. While sitting in a park in front of one of Berlin’s many churches, Evelyn told us she had found it to be an unfortunately true cliché that Berliners seemed to have a gaping hole in their souls. Her uncannily relevant words still echo in my ears, “it’s all a spiral.”

06.04.2016

Admittedly my mind was not with my body in Berlin during this tour because I had just found out the night before that my mother was in the hospital in California, so the majority of my thoughts were on how much it would cost to buy a ticket back to the states in less than 24 hours as opposed to the extensive history of the city of Berlin that was being presented to me. While my brain was tethered to the streets of my hometown, I occasionally let it meander through the miniature streets of the expansive 3D model of Berlin, brushing past the identical artificial trees and windowless buildings that towered above my tiny imaginary self. The differentiation between new and old-standing buildings as white plastic and light brown wood pulled the leash around my heart even closer to Los Angeles, wondering which buildings I could even place as having been built before 2000. My internal comparison of these two metropolises that have incited such different emotions in my being has prompted daily restructures of my understanding of Berlin as a city of “becoming”.

We were given a guided tour of the Jewish Museum in Berlin this last Monday, with a half hour at the end to explore on our own. The main body of the museum is ordered chronologically from the first time Jewish people are known to be living in Western Europe. I tried to start from the beginning of the installations with my half hour, but I didn’t get far at all so I promised myself that I would to talk a little more in.

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Our tour guide’s (Viktor) lecture was on the years between 1871-1933, beginning with the construction of the New Synagogue in Breslau (now Poland) in 1872. The architecture referenced Christian architecture and was an expression of the Jewish community’s  citizenship in what was the newly founded “unified Germany.” Viktor emphasized that the Jewish Germans had been made to take painfully tiny and patient steps to “earn” their civil rights within the German nation in those years leading up to 1933 and had only a few years of freedom before the rise of fascism and the anti-Semitic agenda.

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Visitors of the museum take a tunnel from the welcome area into the modern museum, the pathways below are called the “axes” and are an architectural embodiment of three paths of Jewish life in Germany after the third reich: Exile, Continuation, and the Holocaust. These hallways are twisted  in scale and measure. I was immediately reminded of the set design of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a German silent horror film from 1920.