Right after the seminar in Wünsdorf, I took the train down to Weimar with Elena, a volunteer from Russia who will be living and working with me for the year. There we met our two German flatmates, Marlene and Fabian, who had prepared a picnic to welcome us.
We're living in an apartment right in the middle of the city, not that location is a big issue in Weimar - nothing is more than a fifteen-minute walk away. What is important, though, is that the bus to the memorial site goes right by the front door.
Despite being home to only 65,000 people, Weimar is a hugely important city in German history and culture. Two of Germany's most celebrated writers, Goethe and Schiller, lived here and they're remembered by a large statue in the centre and countless plaques around the city claiming that one or the other had once breathed in a particular place. They also both have the honour of having shopping centres named after them.
The city was home to Luther, Liszt and Bach at different times and it's here that the constitution of what would become known as the 'Weimar Republic' was ratified in 1919. The original Bauhaus school was also opened here in that same year.
However, Weimar also has a darker side to its history. It was chosen to be the location for one of the 'Gauforen', large complexes that merged the ordinary civilian bureaucracy with that of the Nazi party, making the city an important administrative capital of the Third Reich. The Ettersburg mountain overlooking the city became the location for the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, which would become one of the largest within Germany.
Controversially, the old 'Gauforum' complex has recently been lovingly restored and is now used as offices by the Thuringian state government and the (never completed) conference hall at its centre has been converted into a shopping centre.
In comparison to the other towns I've visited so far, it's clear that a lot of money has been put into Weimar since Reunification. If anything, it's almost too perfect - as if it was designed by the same people who built Main Street USA in Disneyworld - but it's proving to be a great place to live and I have no worries about being here for a year.
Sunday 25 September 2011
Saturday 17 September 2011
Museums and recycling bins: our first seminar
I arrived in Berlin on the 2nd of September to attend a ten-day seminar organised by ASF before starting work at my project.
The first thing that struck me about the group of volunteers that I am part of is its diversity. There are 18 of us in total, coming from Germany, the USA, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and me from Ireland. I will be working with one girl from Russia in the Buchenwald memorial, some will work in the Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Neuengamme or Osnabrück memorials, while others will work in the ASF office, the Gay Museum, in the House of the Wannsee Conference, in youth clubs or with elderly Jewish people in Berlin.
The seminar was designed to give us a chance to get to know each other, to find out more about our projects and to help us to adjust to life in Germany.
To my relief nobody expected us to arrive fluent in German, and I wasn't the only person with quite a basic level. Everything we did was through German and English to ensure nobody was left behind, but also to gradually nudge us all in the direction of German. We all tried our best to speak it and a strange mix of the two languages became the norm around the place. Those like myself would say what we could in German and then switch to English (often mid-sentence) when we had to.
But it worked. It started to become more and more natural to speak German, and I stopped worrying so much about my der, die and das and just spoke, hoping I'd be understood.
We discussed history a lot. In particular we compared the different ways the Holocaust affected, and is remembered in, each of our countries. Coming from Ireland, which was virtually unaffected by the Holocaust, it was fascinating and slightly intimidating for me to meet people who had close family members who had been in concentration camps or who had died at the hands of the Nazis.
After listening to people from Israel or Russia talk about their family histories, I felt embarrassed discussing Ireland's neutrality in the War and its refusal to accept refugees. I read a quote from Michael McDowell when he was Minister for Justice in 2003, in which he acknowledged Ireland's failings during the Second World War.
He spoke of the contributions made by individual Irishmen and women to the fight against the Nazis, but claims that 'it remains the case that our State and our society in many ways failed that Constitutional recognition [of a person's right to freedom of conscience and the State's responsibility to protect that right], whether by tolerating social discrimination, or by failing to heed the message of the persecuted, or by failing to offer refuge to those who sought it, or by failing to confront those who openly or covertly offered justification for the prejudice and race-hatred which led to the Shoah'.
The seminar was held in a village called Wünsdorf, about an hour outside of Berlin. In World War One it was used by the German army as a prisoner-of-war camp for colonial regiments of the British and French armies. During the Second World War the village was home to an extensive complex of army bunkers, and it was here that Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, was planned from late 1940. After the War, Wünsdorf found itself in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and the former Nazi bunkers were used as the headquarters of the Soviet army in East Germany until the Reunification of Germany in 1990.
So it's fair to say that we were surrounded by history. We visited the bunker complex, and got a taste of how most of us agreed history should not be presented. The site doesn't receive funding from the German government and is managed by an independent organisation. Our guide showed us around and described almost proudly how the shelters were so well-built that they survived extensive Allied bombing-raids.
We saw photos of locals cheering the Soviet army as they made their final withdrawal from the village in the early-1990s, but there was very little about how oppressive that army had been across Central and Eastern Europe throughout the Cold War period, or of how much of the area surrounding Wünsdorf had been closed to the public for over forty years.
Most of us found this presentation of history a bit disturbing, but I suppose it did have the effect of really making us think of the role of subjectivity and interpretation in the understanding of history.
By way of contrast, we also visited the German-Russian Museum in Berlin. It is housed in the building where Germany signed the capitulation to end the War in Europe in 1945. It presents the history of the War between Germany and Russia, and was put together by historians from both Germany and Russia. The difference in mindset here can be summed up by the reaction of our tour guide when we told him we had already visited the Wünsdorf bunkers: he rolled his eyes and said 'oh, THAT place...'!
The seminar was also an opportunity for us to present something from each of our cultures. Our countries were put into groups and we gave joint presentations, Ireland being grouped with Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic. We had a little table quiz with questions about each country. I learnt that it's not as well known outside Ireland that the Titanic was built in Belfast or that the character of Seamus Finnegan in Harry Potter comes from Ireland. We finished up with a sampling of Polish chocolate, Czech beer and Jameson, before I attempted (as someone who can't even do my 1, 2, 3s) to teach a group of people in a very small room how to dance the Walls of Limerick, but I think they had fun anyway.
And last but not least, we had a lesson on how to separate our rubbish in Germany. I thought that things had become complicated in Ireland - with most people now having three different bins at home - but that we had at least become fairly responsible with our waste. But then I came to Germany.
There's a bin for plastic, one for paper, one for bio-degradable waste, one for glass bottles that you bring back for re-use, three others for glass bottles that you don't bring back, one for plastic bottles that are re-used, another for plastic bottles that aren't re-used (but which you still have to bring back to the shop anyway), and then one for everything else (except anything electrical, of course).
The lesson ended with a little competition. We were divided into two groups and each given a pile of rubbish to sort as fast as we could. I'm happy to report that my team won, but I'm here two weeks now and I still have to check with one of my German flatmates every time I go to throw something out.
The first thing that struck me about the group of volunteers that I am part of is its diversity. There are 18 of us in total, coming from Germany, the USA, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Ukraine, Russia, Israel, and me from Ireland. I will be working with one girl from Russia in the Buchenwald memorial, some will work in the Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Neuengamme or Osnabrück memorials, while others will work in the ASF office, the Gay Museum, in the House of the Wannsee Conference, in youth clubs or with elderly Jewish people in Berlin.
The seminar was designed to give us a chance to get to know each other, to find out more about our projects and to help us to adjust to life in Germany.
To my relief nobody expected us to arrive fluent in German, and I wasn't the only person with quite a basic level. Everything we did was through German and English to ensure nobody was left behind, but also to gradually nudge us all in the direction of German. We all tried our best to speak it and a strange mix of the two languages became the norm around the place. Those like myself would say what we could in German and then switch to English (often mid-sentence) when we had to.
But it worked. It started to become more and more natural to speak German, and I stopped worrying so much about my der, die and das and just spoke, hoping I'd be understood.
We discussed history a lot. In particular we compared the different ways the Holocaust affected, and is remembered in, each of our countries. Coming from Ireland, which was virtually unaffected by the Holocaust, it was fascinating and slightly intimidating for me to meet people who had close family members who had been in concentration camps or who had died at the hands of the Nazis.
After listening to people from Israel or Russia talk about their family histories, I felt embarrassed discussing Ireland's neutrality in the War and its refusal to accept refugees. I read a quote from Michael McDowell when he was Minister for Justice in 2003, in which he acknowledged Ireland's failings during the Second World War.
He spoke of the contributions made by individual Irishmen and women to the fight against the Nazis, but claims that 'it remains the case that our State and our society in many ways failed that Constitutional recognition [of a person's right to freedom of conscience and the State's responsibility to protect that right], whether by tolerating social discrimination, or by failing to heed the message of the persecuted, or by failing to offer refuge to those who sought it, or by failing to confront those who openly or covertly offered justification for the prejudice and race-hatred which led to the Shoah'.
The seminar was held in a village called Wünsdorf, about an hour outside of Berlin. In World War One it was used by the German army as a prisoner-of-war camp for colonial regiments of the British and French armies. During the Second World War the village was home to an extensive complex of army bunkers, and it was here that Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, was planned from late 1940. After the War, Wünsdorf found itself in the Soviet Zone of Occupation and the former Nazi bunkers were used as the headquarters of the Soviet army in East Germany until the Reunification of Germany in 1990.
So it's fair to say that we were surrounded by history. We visited the bunker complex, and got a taste of how most of us agreed history should not be presented. The site doesn't receive funding from the German government and is managed by an independent organisation. Our guide showed us around and described almost proudly how the shelters were so well-built that they survived extensive Allied bombing-raids.
We saw photos of locals cheering the Soviet army as they made their final withdrawal from the village in the early-1990s, but there was very little about how oppressive that army had been across Central and Eastern Europe throughout the Cold War period, or of how much of the area surrounding Wünsdorf had been closed to the public for over forty years.
Most of us found this presentation of history a bit disturbing, but I suppose it did have the effect of really making us think of the role of subjectivity and interpretation in the understanding of history.
By way of contrast, we also visited the German-Russian Museum in Berlin. It is housed in the building where Germany signed the capitulation to end the War in Europe in 1945. It presents the history of the War between Germany and Russia, and was put together by historians from both Germany and Russia. The difference in mindset here can be summed up by the reaction of our tour guide when we told him we had already visited the Wünsdorf bunkers: he rolled his eyes and said 'oh, THAT place...'!
The seminar was also an opportunity for us to present something from each of our cultures. Our countries were put into groups and we gave joint presentations, Ireland being grouped with Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic. We had a little table quiz with questions about each country. I learnt that it's not as well known outside Ireland that the Titanic was built in Belfast or that the character of Seamus Finnegan in Harry Potter comes from Ireland. We finished up with a sampling of Polish chocolate, Czech beer and Jameson, before I attempted (as someone who can't even do my 1, 2, 3s) to teach a group of people in a very small room how to dance the Walls of Limerick, but I think they had fun anyway.
And last but not least, we had a lesson on how to separate our rubbish in Germany. I thought that things had become complicated in Ireland - with most people now having three different bins at home - but that we had at least become fairly responsible with our waste. But then I came to Germany.
There's a bin for plastic, one for paper, one for bio-degradable waste, one for glass bottles that you bring back for re-use, three others for glass bottles that you don't bring back, one for plastic bottles that are re-used, another for plastic bottles that aren't re-used (but which you still have to bring back to the shop anyway), and then one for everything else (except anything electrical, of course).
The lesson ended with a little competition. We were divided into two groups and each given a pile of rubbish to sort as fast as we could. I'm happy to report that my team won, but I'm here two weeks now and I still have to check with one of my German flatmates every time I go to throw something out.
Ich heisse Daniel und ich bin dreiundzwanzig Jahre alt
The minute I found out I'd be moving to Weimar I regretted giving up German after my Junior Cert. What was I thinking picking chemistry instead?
The programme is for international volunteers and prior knowledge of German isn't a necessity, but acceptance came with the understanding that I would do my best to learn as much German as possible before I set off.
Once I had got my finals out of the way, I sat down with 'Teach Yourself German', a book released in the 1930s that my dad had used a few years ago. Modern language books are all about interactivity and buying train tickets, but this one is unashamedly boring. Each section begins with a completely inadequate description of a particular aspect of German grammar (and anybody who has ever studied German knows that there are a LOT of them) and then gives you about twenty sentences to translate in each direction, using your almost-acquired new skills.
And it's absolutely brilliant. In no time at all I was translating complicated sentences about the child's uncle selling books to sailors and maidens from his shop by the beach. Knowing the ins and outs of the genitive case was all well and good of course, but I did also have to learn how to actually speak German so I enrolled in a course in the German cultural institute in Dublin, the Goethe Institut.
I spent three evenings a week for four weeks at the Institut and couldn't believe how much I learnt in such a short time. The two teachers I had were both excellent. They were native speakers and worked to make the classes as relevant and fun as possible, all the while focusing on getting us over the biggest hurdle faced by anyone learning a new language: making actual sounds come out of your mouth.
After my course I set off to Weimar in July delighted with myself and my new ability to speak German. I was going over for a two-week summer camp organised by ASF in Buchenwald - it's a sort of very condensed version of what I'm doing now. The main reason I went was to get a bit of practice in German before I moved over, but I immediately fell into the English-speaker's trap: I spoke English the entire time because everybody around me spoke it far better than I could speak German. Suddenly my pre-fabricated sentences about my family weren't as impressive as people from Germany who could watch 'Friends' in English without subtitles.
This was quite disappointing and I was determined not to let it happen again, so I decided that from the moment I landed in September Gearmánais briste would have to be better than Béarla cliste.
The programme is for international volunteers and prior knowledge of German isn't a necessity, but acceptance came with the understanding that I would do my best to learn as much German as possible before I set off.
Once I had got my finals out of the way, I sat down with 'Teach Yourself German', a book released in the 1930s that my dad had used a few years ago. Modern language books are all about interactivity and buying train tickets, but this one is unashamedly boring. Each section begins with a completely inadequate description of a particular aspect of German grammar (and anybody who has ever studied German knows that there are a LOT of them) and then gives you about twenty sentences to translate in each direction, using your almost-acquired new skills.
And it's absolutely brilliant. In no time at all I was translating complicated sentences about the child's uncle selling books to sailors and maidens from his shop by the beach. Knowing the ins and outs of the genitive case was all well and good of course, but I did also have to learn how to actually speak German so I enrolled in a course in the German cultural institute in Dublin, the Goethe Institut.
I spent three evenings a week for four weeks at the Institut and couldn't believe how much I learnt in such a short time. The two teachers I had were both excellent. They were native speakers and worked to make the classes as relevant and fun as possible, all the while focusing on getting us over the biggest hurdle faced by anyone learning a new language: making actual sounds come out of your mouth.
After my course I set off to Weimar in July delighted with myself and my new ability to speak German. I was going over for a two-week summer camp organised by ASF in Buchenwald - it's a sort of very condensed version of what I'm doing now. The main reason I went was to get a bit of practice in German before I moved over, but I immediately fell into the English-speaker's trap: I spoke English the entire time because everybody around me spoke it far better than I could speak German. Suddenly my pre-fabricated sentences about my family weren't as impressive as people from Germany who could watch 'Friends' in English without subtitles.
This was quite disappointing and I was determined not to let it happen again, so I decided that from the moment I landed in September Gearmánais briste would have to be better than Béarla cliste.
Thursday 15 September 2011
Why?
The question I'm most often asked about what I'm doing is 'why?'
Why would someone with no connection to the Holocaust (and virtually no German) choose to move to a small city in East Germany to work as a volunteer in a former concentration camp?
It's a fairly simple and obvious question, but unfortunately there isn't a simple and obvious answer.
I started looking into what I was going to do after college about a year ago. I considered all the options - continue studying, travel, try to find a job or internship, or go on the dole - but none of them seemed right for me. My classmates and I had spent the first three years of college joking about how unemployable we'd be with degrees in history and political science. But as we started into final year it suddenly hit home: for the first time in our lives there wasn't an apparent 'next step' to be taken.
The thoughts of looking for a 'real' job or of facing into more study made me want to fail my exams so I'd have to repeat. I started looking into the European Voluntary Service (EVS), an EU programme that allows young people to live and work as volunteers abroad, in both member and non-member states.
Literally the first project that caught my attention while I was searching through the mind-boggling EVS database was the very one I'm on now. I was studying the Weimar Republic at the time, so the simple fact that Weimar was listed as the location made me take a look. A year working in Buchenwald concentration camp memorial: it was intriguing, but not really what I had in mind at the time, so I continued looking.
I found a few other interesting possibilities and started looking into them, but Buchenwald had somehow lodged itself in the back of my brain and I kept finding myself reading over the details again and again. I've always found Germany fascinating. Here's a country that went from jingoistic monarchy, through experimental republic and fascist dictatorship, to economic powerhouse in the space of a lifetime, and all while still finding time to give the world Albert Einstein, Bauhaus and Haribo.
Much of our focus in college was on how countries choose to remember and interpret their own histories and the role this plays in forming a society's sense of identity. There is arguably no country with a more troubled history than Germany, but also none which has done more to face up to its past. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this is exactly what I wanted to do.
The programme is run by Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (translated into English as Action Reconciliation Service for Peace), an organisation founded in 1958 by some members of the German Protestant church who felt that they had failed to provide resistance to the Nazi regime. They wanted to ease the suffering of the victims of National Socialism and work to ensure that they are never forgotten. ASF also works across Europe and the USA to fight against racism, anti-Semitism and neo-fascism.
I sent in my application in January, was called for interview in Berlin in February and found out a few weeks later that I'd be heading to Weimar in September...and the rest is history!
Why would someone with no connection to the Holocaust (and virtually no German) choose to move to a small city in East Germany to work as a volunteer in a former concentration camp?
It's a fairly simple and obvious question, but unfortunately there isn't a simple and obvious answer.
I started looking into what I was going to do after college about a year ago. I considered all the options - continue studying, travel, try to find a job or internship, or go on the dole - but none of them seemed right for me. My classmates and I had spent the first three years of college joking about how unemployable we'd be with degrees in history and political science. But as we started into final year it suddenly hit home: for the first time in our lives there wasn't an apparent 'next step' to be taken.
The thoughts of looking for a 'real' job or of facing into more study made me want to fail my exams so I'd have to repeat. I started looking into the European Voluntary Service (EVS), an EU programme that allows young people to live and work as volunteers abroad, in both member and non-member states.
Literally the first project that caught my attention while I was searching through the mind-boggling EVS database was the very one I'm on now. I was studying the Weimar Republic at the time, so the simple fact that Weimar was listed as the location made me take a look. A year working in Buchenwald concentration camp memorial: it was intriguing, but not really what I had in mind at the time, so I continued looking.
I found a few other interesting possibilities and started looking into them, but Buchenwald had somehow lodged itself in the back of my brain and I kept finding myself reading over the details again and again. I've always found Germany fascinating. Here's a country that went from jingoistic monarchy, through experimental republic and fascist dictatorship, to economic powerhouse in the space of a lifetime, and all while still finding time to give the world Albert Einstein, Bauhaus and Haribo.
Much of our focus in college was on how countries choose to remember and interpret their own histories and the role this plays in forming a society's sense of identity. There is arguably no country with a more troubled history than Germany, but also none which has done more to face up to its past. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this is exactly what I wanted to do.
The programme is run by Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (translated into English as Action Reconciliation Service for Peace), an organisation founded in 1958 by some members of the German Protestant church who felt that they had failed to provide resistance to the Nazi regime. They wanted to ease the suffering of the victims of National Socialism and work to ensure that they are never forgotten. ASF also works across Europe and the USA to fight against racism, anti-Semitism and neo-fascism.
I sent in my application in January, was called for interview in Berlin in February and found out a few weeks later that I'd be heading to Weimar in September...and the rest is history!
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