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Germany
Berlin
While I have been in Berlin many times, it had been a bit over three years since my last visit. The major new feature of the centre is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a Holocaust memorial with adjoining museum designed by Peter Eisenman. Consisting of 2,711 concrete slabs, it opened in the spring of 2005.
As the ground slumps down at the middle of the memorial, one can walk deeply among the stelae.
Rather appallingly, on both my visits to the memorial, this inner portion was full of carousing teenagers oblivious to the solemnity the place calls for.
Of course, no visit to the centre is complete without seeing the Brandenburg Gate.
During my first visit to Berlin in the summer of 1999, I attended the World Congress of Esperanto. Its youth participants were lodged in a makeshift dormitory at the gymnasium of the Schillerschule secondary school. There was a small building standing next to it which served as a café. As I discovered on my subsequent trip to Berlin in October 2001, this small building had been demolished and replaced by a garden.
Because of this experience during my first time here, my returns to Berlin formerly evoked nostalghia. Now, however, when it has become apparent that my activity in the Esperanto movement was detrimental to my studies and robbed me of other, richer travel opportunities, being in the city conjurs up a sense of regret. I had already planned to travel to Berlin for that summer, as I have family there and was anxious to go to Europe again after my first trip in the summer of 1998. Now I find myself wondering how much better things could have turned out had I encountered that city independently, with a real view to the local culture.