Berlin, Part I

Since I've been back, a lot of people have asked me what my favorite place on the trip was, and I've never hesitated. The answer is Ios, which is literally the most beautiful and enjoyable place I've ever been. Since Ios is basically fake life, though - it's a tourist-driven town on a beautiful secluded island full of 20-something English-speakers, and is apparently pretty miserable in the winter - I usually follow up that answer by saying Berlin was my favorite normal place.

Most people are somewhat taken aback by this. I'm half-Jewish and full American, and I picked a German city as the best I've seen in Europe?

Thing is, I'm also a nerd when it comes to history, and to know the story of 20th century Berlin is to understand the entire Western world during that time. The juxtaposition of different eras is everywhere in this city. On the way back to my hostel on my last day in Europe, on a subway line that runs from Oranienburg (site of Sachsenhausen concentration camp) to Wannsee (site of the Wannsee Conference, where the Final Solution was planned) and twice underneath where the Berlin Wall used to be, I sat across an elderly woman who I deemed to be in her mid to late 80's.

I remember sitting there marveling over all the different traumatic events that might have happened to her in her lifetime. Maybe she was a Nazi, or maybe she came from a family of resisters. Maybe her husband, father, or brother died fighting in World War II, or maybe in a concentration camp. Was she stuck in the city for the terrifying Allied air raids, or even worse during the Soviet invasion (in which untold thousands of German women were raped by vengeful Red Army soldiers)? Did she spend the Cold War in the West or the East? Did she know someone (perhaps her or her own children) who fled for freedom, or was she an informant for the Stasi? How did she celebrate the fall of the Wall (or did she mourn it)?

It's obviously impossible to know the answers to these questions. It's possible that all of the answers are yes, and it's just as possible that she immigrated from somewhere else along the way. But for someone like me, who has spent so many hours reading about these horrific events, being in the locale where they took place was remarkable.

Of course, simply being the site of some of humanity's worst atrocities would not make Berlin an amazing place. But I don't want all my posts to be novel-length, so I'm breaking this one up for all of our convenience. Especially mine.