Students Explore Germany Through Contemporary and Historical Lens

Over Spring Break, 20 Friends Upper School students traveled to Germany to examine the ever-present issues of reparations and reconciliation, through the lens of both the past experiences and the present challenges of German people — as individuals, as community groups, and as a nation. Students sought to learn more about how cultures and communities repair themselves and move forward in the aftermath of human atrocity, and to consider the debt owed to the world by those who acted as perpetrators.  

 

Germany is a country with a very complicated past, present, and future. It is a country at the heart of one of the worst atrocities in the history of humankind, a country divided for a generation, and today a country on the receiving end of a vast number of refugees from the Middle East – another complicated, nuanced situation. When the Center for Peace, Equity and Justice announced the 2017-2018 school year theme would be the Ethics and Politics of Migration and Immigration, trip leaders Dot Cates and Kristin Marchilena felt the Germany trip would be a natural and authentic fit.

 

As students looked at Germany through a contemporary and historical lens, the essential questions were: How can a country move forward after atrocity? What can a country do to put reparations into place? How can a nation reshape its identity after a human atrocity of this magnitude? Does this reidentification impact the choices the nation makes today? Juxtaposing the United States’ history with Germany’s, what parallels do we see? How has each country responded to the atrocities in our respective pasts? What can we bring back to our community from this investigation?

 

Four days were spent in Berlin, the vibrant capital of reunified Germany. To contextualize the guiding framework and questions at the heart of our program, students visited Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg on the outskirts of the capital. Other salient elements of the Berlin program were visits to the Wall Museum and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a tour of the Reichstag, and a visit to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, left in ruins in the center of the city as a reminder of the destruction of war. Visits with refugee resettlement organizations and organizations doing reparation work (Asylum in the Church and Action Reconciliation for Peace) inspired us. A luncheon with a Syrian refugee family we “met” during a viewing of the film “Sky and Ground” was a highlight of the time in Berlin.

 

Three days in Meißen were spent as guests of German host families, where students got an inside glimpse of how a German family lives. Meißen is a small city of about 30,000 residents near Dresden. Known as the porcelain capital of the world, Meißen was founded in 929 and is also home to the oldest residential castle in Europe. In Meißen we had opportunities to speak and connect with students from a private boarding school, a vocational high school, and a Gymnasium – a more traditional high school for college-bound students. We toured the cathedral, castle, and porcelain factory in the town. We also received a tour of the town’s stumblestones. The stumblestone project is a relatively recent project spearheaded by a Berlin-based artist. Using historical archives and family documents to confirm addresses, Guenther Demnig creates small metal cobblestones that are then placed in the street in front of the last known freely chosen residence of the Jewish people who perished in the Holocaust.  In Meißen we also got to know about the work of Buntes Meißen (Colorful Meißen), an organization whose work focuses on supporting the refugees who are settling in the city. We also received a tour of beautiful Dresden, a historically and culturally important city both in the region of Saxony and the country Germany.

 

We finished our program in Munich, the heart of Bavaria. In Munich we learned about The White Rose, a resistance group who distributed leaflets and spoke out against the rising Nazi party. We visited the site at the University of Munich where they were caught distributing “propaganda,” for which they were ultimately tried and executed for treason. In Munich we also enjoyed a concert of beautiful classical music at the Residenz, had an amazing race scavenger hunt, and enjoyed German food. We finished our trip to Germany with a Meeting for Worship on a peaceful morning in Englischer Garten Park, beneath the Chinese Tower.

 

It was a rich, full program with much food for thought and many weighty themes. Students made connections and posed thoughtful questions, all in an effort to better understand the unique history of Germany, as well as the parallels between German history and our own often turbulent past.