Journal Week 2 Berlin

We started this week with a class led by Viola Georgi who is a professor of diversity with a focus in immigration. Like last week, I was very interested in the talk because she focused a lot on an important point about history that “something can be remembered, even if it is not part of one’s own history.” I love what Viola said here because it relates a lot to my interest in forgotten history. She also inspired me to change the topic of my research project. I am interested in what it means to be German and how people identify within those parameters. Berlin has people from many different countries and backgrounds, and I want to know if people feel like they can identify themselves within what people think it means to be German, and why or why not. This relates to Viola’s talk because many identities and backgrounds are ignored in German classes and history museums when in fact many different people can be classified as German. I want to then relate this to how I feel as a bi-racial woman living in the United States, and how I feel like I am represented in the United States history and United States identity.

            Viola Georgi focused a lot on the history that is taught in Germany as a way for many people to understand their identity, and this history revolves mostly around the holocaust. As a group on Thursday, our class went to Sachsenhausen on an incredibly rainy day and took in as much of what we could from inside different buildings. It was unfortunate that it was so rainy because it was hard to take in everything because everyone was so concerned with being comfortable. This issue, and while I was also to blame for this thinking, is kind of ironic seeing as we have the privilege to tour a concentration camp where people, to say the least, were uncomfortable. But after visiting this concentration camp, and going to the Topography of Terror museum, I have been in shock that something like this could happen, and also scared that our president currently insights similar fear in many people in our country, and I worry that, although hopefully unlikely, something terrible and inhumane could happen again.

            Something terrible and inhumane might not be the extent of the holocaust, but after watching the play tonight at the Gorki Theater, that fact that people in Syria are used to the sound of bombs being dropped around them, seems inhumane. I, like many people in the United States, have been privileged enough to live in a country where no one has to worry if a bomb will kill them one day. The fact that I can take this for granted, and refugees in Berlin and the United States could not is upsetting to me. Especially because our president has made it so okay for people to fear Muslim people. This is a thought that I struggle with a lot, and I am happy to be here with people who I can discuss how unequal are privileges are, and despite the work we are doing, how hard it is to sleep comfortably in a hostel in Berlin while kids are fleeing their country for safety, or listening to bombs drop while they sleep