Travel notes… History repeats…

A recent trip to Germany was a sobering lesson in the history of the past, in the history of our times.

We do this to ourselves, I thought. History of the times. History of our times. Over and over again. In different parts of the world. 

Unbridled power-hungry individuals, operating on fear and terror, greed and prejudice… slaves to their own agenda, they let loose terror, often in the guise of protection, nationalism and even progress. 

History repeats, they say, we accept. I studied history in college. As an idealistic teenager, wanting to change the world, I could never fathom how we could nonchalantly accept that. As a jaded middle-aged person, I still don’t understand why we don’t want to learn from our past. After all, the signs are all there. Yes, history repeats, they say, we accept it. 

Unlike the idealistic teenager I once was, willing to change the world, I offer no solutions. I offer no hope.  What my age (and lack of maturity (?) sigh… according to what my mom said to me recently, sigh…), do offer is our ability to notice, to connect the dots, to see patterns. What my age does allow is to see history in shades of grey and not black and white. Of the motivations and backstories and even the best intentions (and oftentimes greed) of the perpetrators of terror in history.  To see them as human, knowing fully well, humans can simply be cruel and self-serving, even if their pretext (or disillusioned goal) is to serve a nation and the betterment of its people. 

And just perhaps, sitting with unsettling uncomfortable thoughts and occurrences in history, may somehow begin to stir something within us. Something that enables us to connect the dots from the past to our present, to an invisible line of the future.

And then perhaps, even if history repeats, we may be in a position, at least, once in a while... to notice it, to pause it, to change it.  

Holocaust memorial - Berlin

The book burning site in Bebelplatz, Berlin. The specific spot in the square is now poetically, "The Empty Library" where you stare in the ground, to see lines of bookshelves, in the cobblestoned square near Unter de Linden. (Not the best picture, sorry!)   

Mother with her dead son - a Pieta sculpture in Neue Wache serves as a memorial 

Remnants of the Berlin wall

East Side Gallery - art on the wall

According to our tour guide (a historian) below this spot lies the bunker where Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun (who he married a day before) they took their own lives, along with Goebbels (his propogandist) and his wife. As per our history tour guide, the Germans choose to not make any fuss over the location, or turn it into any kind of place of remembrance.