JourneyCOURSE — Munich!

For my JourneyCOURSE on The Village, I chose to go to Munich, Germany. I chose this location because I am very interested in learning more about the Holocaust and its history, and I knew that Munich had been a real crucible for Nazi ideology and political action. So along with 8 other students in my JourneyCOURSE, I hopped on a train in Paris and embarked on what would prove to be an incredible week of learning in the heart of Bavaria.

I had expected Germany to be a challenge on many levels. I don’t speak the language and all of us in my seminar knew from our advance readings and films that the subject matter ahead of was going to be extremely intense. What I got on JourneyCOURSE turned out to be one of the most moving and touching experiences that I had during the entire semester. Learning in Munich, Germany was such a privilege to me, because being there to study history helped me to learn on a deeper level than what I’ve ever felt for myself in a normal classroom. We did our walking lectures and site visits so that we we retraced the rise of the Nazis, stopping to lecture and talk at the actual places where Hitler had rallied his terrible movement and synchronize his ideology of hatred. On Journey, it was as though I felt myself learning from the geography and context that surrounded our group rather than from the specifics we were discussing.

Nowhere was this sense of learning by being “in a place” more true and powerful for me than when our class went to the Dachau concentration camp and had this terrible but moving place as own personal classroom for a day. Beyond what I learned there and had spent weeks reading about before that day, visiting Dachau was one of the most intimate and moving things I’ve ever experienced. From the moment I passed through the notorious main gate, I was beset with an overwhelmingly intense feeling of grief and sadness. To communicate what this feeling was or even where it came from in me feels impossible. Truly, this is a place that needs to be experienced in a personal way rather than just read about or discussed as an abstraction.

Another of the “classrooms” that I learned in was the Nazi Rally Grounds in the city of Nuremberg, where our class took a day’s trip by train to explore. This is the actual spot where the Nazis held their annual party rallies, which our class had seen captured in the famous propaganda film from the 1930s, “Triumph of the Will.” The marching and hateful speeches that had drawn thundering salutes and served to ever more fully shore up Hitler’s power in Bavaria first and then all of Germany were impossible not to consider even as silence and emptiness are what I found today at the mostly abandoned area of the Rally Grounds. Coming to the Rally Grounds left me with a strange and indescribable feeling of outrage and wonder, because from this place and others like it had been launched unspeakable terror and ruin to the very idea of civilization.

Ultimately, JourneyCOURSE in Munich, Dachau and Nuremberg was about much more for me than the horrible history of the Nazis and the Holocaust. It was about a feeling of solemnity toward and intimacy with a history that’s long been of keen interest to me. There are always more books to read or films to see that can lead a person deeper into an understanding about the world of the past. But to finally do what I did one October in Germany — when I stood with my fellow students and our professor right in the middle of where it happened— was an unbelievably personal experience that for me at least seemed to transcend anything I’ve known before as learning.