Bis Bald, Berlin!
If a history museum was a city, it would be Berlin. Walking through the streets of Berlin, I was able to live through Germany’s complicated past and promising future, a culmination of everything we learned about the nation before departure and throughout the trip.
During the final days of our 10-day trip, we had a walking tour through the streets of Berlin where we immersed ourselves in the rich and complex history of the city. The walking tour was extremely insightful and incredibly detailed in the history it provided in contextualizing the streets that we were walking down. Every street was a different story. In particular, viewing the Berlin Wall in person truly revealed to me how recently Germany’s complex history came to a culmination, also reminding me how relatively new the modern-day nation is. In addition to this, we visited the Bundestag and the eye-opening DDR museum which provided a lot of context to the political and historical forces at play in Germany’s development as a nation.
One of the questions I had coming into the course was how to most effectively intersect economic, social, cultural, and environmental forces to cultivate sustainable development. The walking tour alongside some of our other visits to Berlin allowed me to draw the intersection between the different realms and understand why Germany has made the decisions that it has made in its political sphere. Germany is a nation of multiple, multicultural, complex, and lost identities, a nation that is actively still trying to build up a uniform identity representative of its history and its modern-day population. With this, each decision that Germany makes is truly trying to work towards building the identity of a unified, modern, and progressive Germany, not one that is reflective of one group of people or specific moments of its past, but rather the nation and its history as a whole.
Our time in Germany was compact and action-packed, and Berlin proved to be the perfect finale to our trip. I hope to return to Germany in the near future to explore more of the country and its rich, complicated, history and its strides towards sustainability and a green future. In addition to this, I still have questions for Germany. Although we touched on it multiple times during the course and the trip, I still wonder how Germany has been able to cultivate such a strong and dedicated green movement within its nation. Compared to its neighbors and other developed nations around the world, there is a higher level of urgency that Germany holds towards achieving sustainable development and I would like to further explore the root cause of that. Until then, I will take the knowledge I learned from this course and trip into my future endeavors of enacting meaningful sustainable development.
Bis bald!
Jade
