Wall-Walking

Location: Bus from Berlin to Wittenberg

Listening to: Gabe Glass - Edelweiss

Every morning you greet me...

I really do love this song (and it's the name of my favorite run at Winter Park).  I always wanted to be Captain Von Trapp, plucking my guitar and singing the sweet little melody.  Unfortunately, it was chosen as the theme for this year’s “senior song”, so I may never hear it the same way again.  For those of you who haven’t sung with a touring choir - I think most of them do this - our seniors get together and write a parody describing our trip to a tune all of us love until that point, adding another verse every bus trip.  Clementine, You Are My Sunshine, Over the Rainbow - they’re all tainted in my memory, but it’s a small sacrifice for all the other memories made on these trips.

It was an early morning yesterday, some of which you can read in my last post.  I’ll pick up where I left off: the bus tour.  Our guide, Christoff, was absolutely fantastic.  He spoke very clearly and never ran short on stories that were funny, meaningful, or both.  He had a very intimate understanding of the fall of the Berlin Wall because was there.  Actually, he understood American perceptions of the event even more thoroughly because he had been Tom Brokaw’s limo driver when NBC arrived in ’89.  We toured a large part of central West Berlin (the city is HUGE) via bus, then hopped out and walked through the Brandenburg gate onto the Parisian Plaza, then down to the holocaust memorial.  It’s an incredible sight if you’ve never been there, especially when you walk through the sculpture as the architect intended.  We hopped back on the bus and toured our way to the hotel.  I took quite a few pictures, so again I’ll let them tell more of the story than my commentary.

I will say that touching the Berlin Wall, feeling that symbol of interpersonal division and tyranny on my fingers, made the history and significance of this place come to life in a unique, visceral sense.  I can’t imagine what it feels like for a modern East Berliner to do this, or for any Jew to touch the memorials in Berlin or D.C. or Dachau, or for anyone whose ancestors were enslaved to touch or see a memorial to their emancipation.  I can imagine even less what it must feel like to be a victim of the genocides yet unresolved and unmemorialized - active sufferers of human arrogance and pride blown to lethal proportions.  As a good friend of mine put it in a poem, I am “historically white” - privileged to have descended from loving, faithful, hard-working families which have been blessed beyond my own comprehension, but those of us who have been privileged in such a way cannot ignore the sufferings of our fellow human beings in good conscience (and to ignore one’s conscience is neither right nor safe).

Today, we go to Wittenberg, the place that in some ways started it all as far as my own history is concerned.  It’s mind-boggling to consider how one man’s convictions have affected my own life centuries and an ocean away from his own, or to try and imagine the scenes I’m about to see with my own eyes.  Martin Luther’s actions changed the world forever - he opposed those who sought to take advantage of their fellow human beings via the trust placed in their offices in the name (or place) of God.  In serving his Creator, he took decisive and rebellious actions to throw off those who tried to oppress his people to their own profit.  On second thought, maybe I can imagine what it feels like to touch the places where liberators and visionaries freed my ancestors.  Maybe, in the course of human history, every person’s ancestry is tainted by the sins of fathers and mothers, and maybe it’s precisely in this unified suffering that communities like the multicultural neighborhoods surrounding our hotel in Berlin are able to exist in peace.  Maybe looking through a window into a shop or a church or a prison is not so different from the mirror in the bathroom.  Maybe this is precisely why music is so potent when it is our only means of communication, the common language of friends, strangers, families, and even enemies.  Maybe this is the reason we’re here.

Sorry to end on such a serious note, but I've got to run - Auf Wederstehen.