Nowtopian

Weird combination of topics for this final Berlin dispatch. Want to show a bunch of photos at the end of the lovely bike lanes that are normal parts of the streets here in Berlin. Some are side-paths and some are pink marked lanes in the streets. So those photos come up at the end.

First, today we went off to see the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, thanks to Jessica Loof, our co-host here, who is just learning how to conduct the tour of the place. It’s unrelentingly bleak, even though we had the strange juxtaposition of visiting the sprawling site where the Nazis really figured out how to industrialize their death camps during a very warm, summer day among chirping birds and calm 21st century tourists. The fear of course is that people visit a place like this and leave comforted that “this will never happen again,” but of course it is. Though not under the rigid German organization of the Nazis, there have been slave labor camps continuously since the days of WWII.

While this place in Orianenberg just north of Berlin was in the hands of the Soviet Union, and then the German Democratic Republic, they emphasized the role of this camp in imprisoning and liquidating German communists. There are many explanatory displays and memorials around the huge facility, many quite interesting and informative. But towering over the whole place is this ridiculous monument, which has a statue at the bottom with a Red Army soldier and a Communist partisan freeing an altogether too healthy looking communist prisoner. Apparently the sculptor had to re-do it several times to beef up the characters and make the powerful socialist men look more socialist-realist and awe-inspiring than historic truth might have allowed for…

Continue reading Sachsenhausen and bikelanes