Why Berlin?

I started this blog because I had an epiphany while I was writing in my journal about the experiences of my day. The practical upshot of that is that I started the whole thing in the middle of a particular line of thought, most of which my audience was not privy to. In the hopes of rectifying that error, I think it's time to explain my itinerary, or at least Berlin, the first stop.

It all started ten years ago (almost to the day as one of my friends reminded me), I began my Junior Year in Munich experience, which would change my life forever. It's fun to be able say something that melodramatic and have it be accurate as well. I was supposed to be a chemist or an engineer. And I had done a lot of work and put a ton of effort into that whole becoming an engineer or a chemist thing. Turns out, at Case your junior year is when all of that really gets shaken out, sort of the meat of the major takes over. But instead of spending that year in a lab and cursing my clumsiness with partial differential equations in physical chemistry, I spent it in Germany studying about the nature of reading and Aristotle's poetics. That meant that I was never going to be able to finish my chemistry degree without adding another year to my schooling. Since I could not also add another year to my scholarship, I took the German degree and sort of ran with it. Ten years down the road, I have no degree in Chemistry, I do have another degree in Germanic Studies, and I work in theatre. Which all makes a kind of sense, to someone, I suppose. And now, in another attempt to change careers, or really to settle into the career I always wanted, but never really knew how to get into, I found myself with some time. It was time to travel.

My time in Germany with JYM didn't just change my life by accidentally altering my career path. I met incredible people and visited incredible places. After 11 months in Munich, I got to know it and came to love it (apparently, this is a difficult thing to do if you are just backpacking through the place). And I will be visiting Munich as well, of course during Oktoberfest, and hopefully for the twentieth Tag der deutschen Einheit. But for 10 days in February, I was captivated by the city of Berlin. Ten days didn't seem like enough and I always wanted to experience it in more depth without the pressure of class and a time crunch.

Berlin fascinates me in a way that few other cities have managed. Long before I became a German major, way back in 4th grade, I began to consume whatever information I could find about World War II, indeed the first book on the subject that I can remember reading is William Shirer's personal account of his time in Berlin called The Nightmare Years (I should probably read that book again . . . ). The book made me intimately familiar with much of Berlin's history during this time. One of the first memories that I have of the news, of the outside world, is of the Berlin Wall coming down. I distinctly remember Mom and Dad making me stop whatever I was doing so that I could pay attention to history as it was happening. Between those two formative events, I was primed to fall in love with Berlin after the fall of the wall, a little over a decade later. Millions of Americans are as well. I am annoyed to think that I came from such a cliched touristy place, but . . . well, I did.

It was the combination of the original ten days in Berlin, as well as the academic training that took the spark and turned it into a flame. Now I am armed with cultural training about the construction of monuments and the meaning of public spaces and how architecture speaks. Berlin is a deadly combination of all of those things, since its history is so layered with monumental architecture, awful things, beautiful redemptive things, and a culture that is attuned to that history and rarely makes big decisions without referencing or acknowledging the weight of the past, and that includes the more radical, creative part of the city as well. Looked at in this way, the question isn't why Berlin? The question is why would I go anywhere else? And for a long time, I thought about it, not going anywhere else, except for Munich which is indispensable, even if it wasn't Oktoberfest (still have never heard a satisfactory explanation of why something that starts in the middle of September and only ever has a couple of days in October, gets called Oktoberfest). But in the end, the draw of the new, of other places that I always meant to discover but never did (Basel and Switzerland, Amsterdam, and Brussels) was too much. I couldn't be that close to them again and not go. Again.

I was originally going to talk a little bit more about the fascinating history of Berlin, now that I have elaborated on the fact that I am fascinated by it, but I think I will save that for my next post. The last one that will be made from Berlin, though assuredly not the last one about Berlin.