[Many small people]
It has been an eventful week; for one thing, I’m lucky enough that my family was able to visit me here in Berlin! They arrived on Friday, and we spent the weekend exploring the area, from the Berlin Wall all the way to Potsdam, a neighboring city in the state of Brandenburg. It seems my family brought the Pennsylvania heat wave with them, as the temperatures here have finally crested 90°F, but it is nice that it finally feels like summer. We’ve never taken a family vacation outside of the United States, and suddenly we’re walking along the East Side Gallery, passing through the Brandenburg Gate, and admiring the impossibly high ceiling of the Berliner Cathedral together. It’s a little surreal if I’m being honest, and I think they agree—especially when their jet-lag enters the equation. It’s also been a pleasantly surprising flip for me to take on the position of ‘guide’, when just a few weeks ago I barely knew up from down in this city. It’s kind of amazing how quickly things become familiar.
While much of what we’ve done here has been super fun, we’ve also taken on some of the more serious sights of the city. Everyone is familiar with the painful elements of Berlin’s past, but it is a different experience entirely to visit the Holocaust memorials in person. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a sprawling labyrinth, much more so than any pictures properly represent, and even without a single word carved into the stone monoliths, it manages to convey a heavy sense of respect, mourning, and remembrance. That being said, it hits especially hard after reading about the history it warns against repeating, which we did before wandering through it, and is largely what I’ve been doing at work for the past week. The first memorial we walked through was dedicated to the Roma and Sinti peoples, as well as the other ethnic minorities of Eastern Europe who were subject to mass extermination in the Third Reich. After reading through about 10 panels summarizing the atrocities committed against these groups from the 1920s to 1945, the path through the memorial led to panels commemorating people who had stood up for their beliefs, their families, and their culture, often in the face of certain death. It was both inspiring and extremely disheartening to read through their stories—trying to grapple with the overwhelming human capacities for both love and hate feels a bit like trying to conceptualize the size of the universe.
The next memorial, which was dedicated to homosexuals persecuted under the Nazi Regime, was in some ways a visualization of that idea. It was simple in design; while it had very few words compared to the one we had just walked through, its history was shown rather than told. It consisted of a singular monolith, nearly identical to those across the road in the Jewish memorial, except that it lay crooked in the ground, and it had a window at eye-level. Inside, there was a video of a gay couple and a lesbian couple kissing, which was layered over images of LGBTQ+ individuals throughout history being systematically murdered and repressed. This strong juxtaposition of love and hate is exactly what we were left with as we entered the Field of Stelae. It was quite a heavy experience, but at the same time quite a rewarding one.
This was especially intense after the week I’ve had at my internship. Since May, I’ve been working on deciphering and cataloguing signatures in The Golden Book, otherwise known as the yearbook of Ernst Busch University from back in its early years (1905-1951), when it was still associated with the Deutsches Theater. Each student signed the book, and some left quotes and pictures along with their names. This week, I reached the year 1933. Naturally, some of the quotes are truly difficult to read, as there were many Jewish students who were forced to leave the school before their graduation, and their fears and hopes bled through their words even 92 years later. These students might have been born a century ago, but in this book they’re my age. Some are younger. Suddenly history doesn’t seem so old, and there’s a lot that can be learned in studying the small people, the ones whose names aren’t taught in school. I’ve learned much in this internship, but one of the most irreplaceable lessons to me is that engaging with primary sources can really give you a new perspective. At Pitt, I’ve had very few opportunities to work directly with historical artifacts in this way, so I value the experience I’m getting at Ernst Busch.
Along with primary source work, I’ve been collecting more skills to use in my field of study. Transcription is a big deal in the archival world, and I’ve become much better at deciphering old handwriting. I’ve had to adapt considerably, given that the books, letters, and postcards I’ve been working with are all written in 19th and early-20th century German cursive (which is hard to read even for native German speakers), so it is some of the hardest transcription work I’ve ever encountered. I’ve also learned how to interact with online museum and archival research databases (like Museum-Digital, Lobid, and Kalliope), how to dry-clean archival materials, and how to collaborate with a curatorial team. Something I’ve never encountered in my schooling is the matter of copyright, but since we are hoping to open the archive to the public, we have to make sure materials are published properly. Thus, I’ve also become practiced in the intricacies of German copyright law, which is luckily very similar to American. Overall, working here has been an invaluable experience.
