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.
No comments:
Post a Comment