Well, the gang is all here! All-in-all, gathering them up from the airport and train stations was rather uneventful. Just one flight hiccup and one ICE train delay. Very thankful for that. It nice to finally be all together in Berlin after having met several times as a group in our pre-tour spring meetings.

Let me say emphatically, the questions are already flowing. “Did I see a Nazi pin on the shirt of that guy who was panhandling?” “How do the Germans feel about people coming to their country to learn about the Holocaust?” “Is it just me or are they so assertive in some ways and yet so polite in others?” This is the first time in this part of Germany for all of them, and for most this is their first time in Europe. I am really looking forward to all of the interactions we are going to have in the coming days.

I’ve challenged them to think about the history they are going to enter into not as merely a “narrow” history, one that is only useful to explain what happened at one particular time and in one particular place, but also not as historical allegory, where the history is only there to serve some particular and discrete set of predetermined moral lessons. Instead, I challenged them to think of the Holocaust in terms of allegorical history. I’ll try to lay out this idea in more detail later in the tour.

After we got into our rooms and created a little space in the day to sleep and recover from inter-continental travel, we decided to only visit two areas this evening – the East Side Gallery (and the adjoining picturesque Oberbaum Bridge) followed by the Zoo-Garden Plaza and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. Tomorrow we will cover a lot of ground as we start the day early and tackle an extensive walking tour of downtown Berlin…a lot of the subject matter will be darker in nature.

Below are some pics from the day – several from the perspective of students. Enjoy!