Two fun activities today. One is
geocaching. People hide small boxes of stuff (worthless stuff, as trophies the contents aren't worth much) in locations all over the world. Then they post clues to the locations of their chaches online. Anybody with a GPS device (most of our cell-phones) can search for the cache. Once you find it, you pull a book out of the box and pencil in the date and time. Leave a note. Take an object or leave one. Then move on to the next cache.
In Friedrichshain and Neukoelln we looked for caches. Despite online photographic clues, we simply couldn't find a cache located at the
Frankfurter Tor U-Bahn station. We were more successful in Neukoelln. At the site of the ruins of the first gas station in the city we found a cache. Joon made the point that geo-cachers often choose spots of historical or other interest. He pointed out that both sites we checked would introduce a stranger to some of the cooler neighborhoods in Berlin.
We also kept our eyes out for Stolpersteine (without too much success, I fear--I was always looking up). In 1992, Gunter Denning of Cologne came up with concept combining public art memorialization and collective memory. He has placed approximately 7000 "stumble-stones" throughout Germany. He began his project in the Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg boroughs because they had previously been home to significant Jewish populations.
Stones (metal plaques) are laid in the sidewalk at the location of a person's last place of residence prior to deportation. Each stone includes the victim's name, birth-year, date of deporation and fate. Denning had the following to say about his project:
"The memory of this person will be called concretely into our day-to-day lives through the personal memory of this person, at the home where he lived until deportation. Each individual's stone goes on to symbolize the entirety of the victims, because it is impossible to actually place all of the stones."
These are not only Jewish victims, either. Sinti and Roma, political foes, homosexuals, Jehova's Witnesses are other groups included in the project.
