Author: JoJo Essuman

The program was an absolutely brilliant one. I mean, it had its ups and downs, and in certain moments I was a bit homesick. Apart from that, it was challenging, interesting, and usually exciting. I think my favorite part was the 3 day weekend and the trips to different places. Honestly, I wish I could stay in Germany.

The most interesting part, I feel, of Wittenberg is Martin Luther’s house. This house seemed to make the processes and events of the reformation come alive. This said, a part that came alive to me that I feel is important to mention was just how flawed Martin Luther was. Thing is, people like him are portrayed as saints fighting for noble causes. However, many of these people also have serious flaws and faults that history fails—or simply forgets– to mention. For example, Martin Luther “published four anti-Jewish tracts” in which he “advocated, among other things, that recalcitrant Jews should be expelled from the country and their synagogues burned.”

So while we continuously remember and celebrate our “heroes”, we must remember that – like everybody else—they were flawed

What was most disturbing to me about Sachsenhausen and The Holocaust Memorial was not the sheer extent of the human depravity that made the systematic murder of so many people possible. It was not the fact that within a few years, about six million people were killed. It was not the glee with which Nazi officials carried out their atrocities and indifference with which some other Germans watched . What disturbed me most is how closely the rhetoric in the years preceding the official beginning of systematic murder so closely resembles the rhetoric I see in the world today.

This time, “Jewry equals crime” has been substituted by “Immigrants equals crime,” and anti-Jewish rumblings have been replaced by anti -Semitic carnival floats in Belgium and white supremacist parades in the United States.

I can only hope for the best: that what happened then will not happen again. However, it would be foolish of me to say it could never happen again.

 

The first thing that strikes me about Germany, or Berlin rather, is how it is- simultaneously- very multicultural and very German it is.  It seems like someone in Heaven decided to mix New York and Grand Rapids together, with a combination of people from a million different places, and “plain” Germans. Also, there’s a very liberal atmosphere that seems to have a healthy dose of laissez-faire and a mind-your-own business attitude that guarantees that people on buses and on trains feel isolated.  Whether that’s a good or bad thing, I’ll leave it to you who reads this.

When I flew out from America, I expected a vibrant city with history and diversity, and that is what I found. What I did not expect, however, was the sheer paradox of isolation and interconnectedness in the city.

I could get used to this.

 

Bremen was, by far, one of the most interesting cities I’ve ever seen. It’s an eclectic mix of both modern and old. With H&M shops right next to decades- old buildings and Statues depicting decades old poems next to sausage stands with flashing neon lights. It’s this quality, I think, that makes Bremen special. Rather than tear down the old to make space for the new, or rather than building the new ways off from  the old, they’re intertwined, they stand together, and in some cases, they’re within each other, and I think that’s admirable.