Midterm week while traveling through Germany!

My week has been crazy, crazy meaning stressful but awesome! Hence I haven't posted all week. This post would be far too long if I told you every story, but to give you an idea, here is a list of what I did:

-Trip to Nürnberg (the photo is of me in front of the Nürnberg skyline)

-Celebrated Angela's birthday by swimming in the Weißensee with my German and American friends

-Saw the German musical “Linie 1” with my theater class

-Krupp Internship Trip to Essen

-Midterms: two essays (one in German, one in English), an in-class midterm, and a book to read in German.

Let me start with my trip to Nürnberg with my ethics and medicine class. As I already said, I love this class. It’s my favorite, mostly because Dr. Regina Casper is amazing! While in Nürnberg we saw the Nazi Party rally grounds, went to an interesting museum about Nazi Germany, saw the sight of the Nürnberg trials, went on a tour of historical Nürnberg, and ate Nürnberg Lebkücken. YUM! 

After spending the entire day learning about Nazi Germany here are some of my reactions:

In my class we watched part of the Nazi propaganda film, the Triumph of the Willing. This 1936 film shows thousands of Germans cheering on Hitler. I had never seen real footage of such overwhelming support of Hitler, and it frightened me. How could an entire community be so wrong in the way they viewed the world? Of course we all know the history and the events that led to WWII, but it really never ceases to amaze me how so many people were so wrong. People have, of course, been wrong throughout history through racism, sexism, faulty scientific and religious beliefs, strange distribution of wealth, and firm beliefs in faulty political systems. The next question of course is what beliefs do I have that are wrong, and what values do we have as a society that are also wrong? I’m not talking about the things we as a society know are wrong or flawed but continue to do, I’m talking about the things we don’t know. There must be things we think are right but in one hundred years society will realize that in 2011 we were completely wrong. The Germans did not know that their faith in Hitler was so wrong, but now they do. To explain this phenomenon I decided that society is kind of like a child, growing, developing, and learning from past mistakes. I suppose this means that, like Woodrow Wilson, I believe in progress.

After the trip to Nürnberg was Angela's birthday. A group of Germans and Americans all went to Weißensee to swim and celebrate Angela coming into this world. Apparently it is a Berlin tradition to go swimming on May Day. This is a picture of most of the group in Tiergarten having a picnic lunch before heading to the lake for a swim.

On Tuesday I saw Germany's longest running play "Linie 1" (we saw the 1499th performance!). It is a musical about the U-Bahn Linie 1 (Subway route line 1). Overall, I loved it, but I, of course, am biased towards musicals. It was a fun show, and the audience was mostly children. There was even a big group of Bavarian school children who showed up wearing dirndls and lederhosen. Though I loved the show, for the first time in a Berlin theater I was disappointed by the performance of the leading actress. She showed a lack of awareness and continuity of her facial expressions and body language. Though this was disappointing, she had a great voice and there were a number of other excellent performers. Because the show was all about Berlin, the various districts, the Berlin stereotypes, the Berlin dialect, and the split city, I loved watching the show and knowing that I understood many of their references. This definitely would not have been true a month ago, so I was proud to feel like an insider watching the show about my city. Here is a video of some clips of the show:

The next day we left for Essen, paid for by the Krupp Foundation. Krupp treated us so well, but I think I'll blog about this tomorrow once I've gone through all of my pictures.

This weekend I was going to go to Amsterdam (most Stanford students traveled there this weekend) or to Bremen to visit my friend Holger, but both plans fell through. Oh well, I guess I will just have to spend my weekend in Berlin… life is hard. What ever shall I do? Opera? Ballet? Berlin Philharmonic? Jazz club? Go to the nightclub rated number one in the world? Swimming in one of Berlin’s many lakes? German History Museum? Natural History Museum? Art museum? Any number of other museums? the Zoo? Decisions decisions… I’ll let you know. 

German word of the day today is unterhaltsam, which means entertaining. I learned this word from Cemilie when trying to write my essay for theater class.

In other news, Osama Bin Laden was killed this week 66 years to the day after Hitler committed suicide.