After three days in the Rhineland, I have finally made it to Berlin. In December, when I wrote my grant proposal, I imagined I would limit my trip to Berlin and Krakow alone. By March, however, I decided that it would make far more sense to invest more of my own money into this trip and stay longer. I attended the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn during the '91-'92 academic year, and in the summer of '93 I worked at a local movie theater and recieved training as a projectionist. I have fond recollections of working late-night film festivals (Star Trek I - V, Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns) and watching Bill Murray in Groundhog Day and Demi Moore's Indecent Proposal with German voiceovers.

I took advantage of the extra time to recover from my jet-lag and catch up with old friends. For the most part, I spent my time eating, watching the World Cup (the German loss to Serbia on Friday left everyone feeling pretty sober) and catching up. University friends I remember for their late-night shenanigans are now busy parents, with children ranging in age from 11 months to 13 years. However, I also found time (especially between the hours of 3:00 - 5:00 am) to read from a pair of books I brought with me. More on those later.

Finally, I visited a newer Museum in Bonn, the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. (House of German History of the Federal Republic of Germany). We arrived so late in the day that I had to race through 60 years of post-war history in a mere two hours, so I'll have to visit again the next time I'm in Bonn.

Museums and monuments are exciting to me not only because they reflect an exciting combination of aesthetic as well as scholarly interests. They are public expressions of national identity or political will. I find the results of the social process of collective identity formation fascinating. Just as individuals continually process their own personal experiences in order to define themselves, so do nations and institutions rely on symbol and narrative in to best articulate a shared set of values. Only then can politicians and other civic leaders frame policy debates that promise to define the future. In a totalitarian society, leadership defines a collective identity and compels the individual to assume a proper attitude. In contrast, an open society is always in the process of arriving at a more or less consensual collective “story” of the past. Consider what happened recently when Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell attempted to curry favor with his political base by casting an alternate political narrative about the Civil War. 

Naturally, that's why the study of history and literature go hand-in-hand. No people can understand who they are apart from the collected documents that serve as a national or institutional "diary". The Scarlet Letter illustrates the relationship between religious intolerance and individual growth, while Mark Twain provokes individuals and (in Huck Finn) insists that we embrace the moral imperative to reflect on the impact of our actions within an open society.

The Haus der Geschichte reminded me of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum., despite the very different subject matter and the former's more optimistic trajectory of its narrative arc. At the Holocaust Museum in DC, visitors are asked to identify with the victims of Nazi policies (each receives a "passport" including the life story of someone who experienced the Holocaust). Visitors then ride to the top of the building in an elevator. As each visitor passes through the museum, she “reads” a collection of texts and artifacts that describe an increasingly dark journey, beginning with a story of prejudice and political seduction and ending with the near total destruction of a people. It combines powerfully researched historical analysis with artifacts and documents that bring the reality of a distant time to life. 

In Bonn, the Haus der Geschichte invites visitors to experience the rise of a an increasingly democratic and humanist Germany from the rubble of Hitler's Reich. East German history is fully integrated into the story, as are stories as varied as the rise of consumer culture and the student unrest of the late 60s. My favorite artifact was auditory! A piece of music that played over an animated advertisement from the late 50s. I can’t recall the lyrics, but they were accompanied by the music to Elvis' "Teddy Bear". I'll see if I can't find it on You-Tube once I have a proper internet connection.

I visited the museum with a friend and her 6-year old daughter. Maja was excited by many of the displays and anything delivered by video. She took me by the hand to show me a "Rosinen-Bomber" (raisin-bomber) , one of the German pet-names for the C-47 transport planes that flew round-the-clock missions into West Berlin during the '48 crisis. This particular model was, in fact, lovingly crafted out of actual raisins. 

I still have to finish Brecht's Fear and Suffering in the Third Reich prior to turning in tonight. I'll be watching the play tomorrow night.