Berlin: Monuments and Memory
Last week, from June 8 to 17, I joined fifteen other Poly students and Mr. Feldmeth, Ms. Fleming, and Ms. Pringle on the Global Initiatives Program’s first Berlin trip. The theme of the trip — which we read about and discussed for months prior — was “monuments and memory.” The theme is apt for a city that is constantly trying to strike a balance between progress and remembrance, constantly trying to redefine itself without letting the beautiful and terrible relics of its past disappear into its sandy soil. In our pre-trip meetings, the piece of Berlin’s history that I found most striking was its origin: Berlin was not conceived as a unified city. Instead, it was born from two villages conjoined in the fifteenth century. It has spent the past six hundred years tearing itself apart.
In our excursions, which averaged ten miles of walking per day, we encountered reminders of the city’s many pasts — medieval, Weimar, fascist, communist — at every turn. Berlin has groves of monuments in its parks, mossy spores of monuments on its cobblestones, and a mulch-like covering of placards memorializing sites that no longer exist. Walking through Berlin, I was made perpetually aware of this delicately balanced ecosystem.
Some of the memorials are, I discovered, surprisingly new. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, for example, is less than twenty years old. Because of this, the monuments and sites that are most memorable to me are those that remain purposefully untouched from a former — and often darker — time. In the Berlin suburb of Oranienburg, the Sachsenhausen concentration camp still stands at the end of a tree-lined street. A towering memorial from the camp’s Soviet occupation, which commemorates only the communist political prisoners interned there, still rises almost obscenely over the yard. Even in summer, it seems that grass has never really grown inside the walls. Throughout east Berlin, physically and emotionally cumbersome monuments of the Soviet period still litter the cityscape. Some have been removed to make way for modernity, while others have been allowed to remain as a constant reminder.
Having grown up in Los Angeles, where everything is paved over with mini malls and hastily inserted trees, I found the places of Berlin where various pasts have been allowed to show through compelling. As cramped as the city may feel with all the history proliferating each park and street corner, the decisions that make Berlin what it is today are tangible. The city feels aware of its tendency towards ideological extremes and physical rift, perpetually opening up new spaces for development and regurgitating markers of its past to prevent their erasure amid the city’s clamor for reinvention.
