Today certainly didn’t start out as planned. Carson Allwes, one of our students fell last night, and Lorena Bianchi (our tour manager) and I took her to Charite Hospital. It took about three hours to find out she has a ruptured ligament in her right foot. With crutches and an air cast, we were on our way to our visit to Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster.
An aside: Thank goodness for Point Park’s international travel insurance. The triage clerk wanted 300 euros from us before Carson could be treated. HTH Worldwide cleared that up quickly with a fax. And who would we meet and talk to in the tiny waiting room but a guy originally from Scotland and a teacher with an English accent who teaches in a private school here and wants to come to the USA for a creative writing fellowship in Nevada. The guy was a hoot, no matter his aching back, telling us Berlin is really an ugly city (we let him go on ….). She told us how the Germans disdain anything that’s not science or technology driven; her students don’t start writing essays until ninth grade. And she claimed they don’t want to remember their horrible past in World War II and the Holocaust. But we admired her: She had been hit by a tram (injured the same foot as Carson, but still went to school first and stayed there until the pain became too intense. Her students’ work is important at this time of year, and she wanted to be there for them.
On to Deutsche Welle and the enthusiastic Fabian von der Mark, head of office managing director multimedia global. DW just marked its 60th year in operation. It’s job: as a public broadcaster, disseminate news of the country around the world and foster the German language.
(We tell students all the time that the European media aren’t used to visits and tours like ours. They are flattered! And we always learn so much more about international journalism with these visits. We can study and research all we want back home … seeing and witnessing it first hand is something else entirely.)
The station and its six channels of operations (German precision here, that’s for sure) were intriguing, and the students’ blogs can explain more. What I loved was his obvious yet quiet and professional dedication to DW’s mission. This 24/7 operation doesn’t focus on breaking news but instead provides documentaries and magazine shows (which I love) on many topics to many countries. Fabian also displayed a passion for his country’s beautiful language and long history of great philosophy and literature. It’s something I haven’t given much thought to, I must admit. I loved it.
He was also very open about why DW came into being after Germany was such a pariah to the rest of the world after its awful destruction of Europe, the Jews and other groups. “Rightfully so,” he told us, down to being banned from soccer’s 1950 World Cup.
Having seen most of the Topographie of Terror yesterday, (and so sad that with all that occurred today I didn’t get back there today to finish it …. maybe Thursday if I get a chance) Germany deserved that sentence. And maybe even more. The stories of the men and women killed or who committed suicide in 1933 in Hitler’s run-up to his awful reign …. just horrible. And the photos of Germans going along with the public shaming and humiliation, book burnings, and violent beatings and torture until death are particularly abhorrent.
But you must give the Germans credit for offering this display and information center to its citizens and visitors at no charge. It’s backdrop of most of what remains of the Berlin Wall reminds us of the communists’ ugly chapter in history here. But you sure can convince people — as Hitler and his leaders and the Soviets tried to mimic — to follow you with jobs, food, shelter, money and security. Both came into power during times of tremendous despair and poverty. And people can be fooled.
Fabian took us to the rooftop of DW as we ended our visit, and the students took and posed for photographs with the expanse of Berlin as the background. Beautiful Berlin, I’d say, despite what the Scotsman turned German resident (he followed a woman here, he told us ….) claimed today.
Fabian pointed out to me that where the Berlin Wall once stood the Germans have turned those areas into parks, beautiful squares and more. It’s hard to see where it was, all 92 miles of it, he told me, because it wound its way through at weird angles and paths through the city and then the Soviets added on death traps and secondary walls from the original. The curved two paths of cobblestones around here marks it forever. And I think it’s marked and will be remembered forever with journalists and other people like Fabian, as it should be.
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