of beautiful neighborhoods and internships

I got of the Straßenbahn - commuter train - on a whim. As I headed home from my internship, I had glanced out the window and noticed some beautiful old buildings that merited further exploration. So I stepped off the train to investigate.


I found myself in a beautiful neighborhood. I think it was an old military post from before the war, and the barracks have now been turned into apartment buildings. I wandered for awhile, and then found this building.

It was a Red Cross station during the Cold War, where volunteers cared for refugees who had made it out of East Berlin. Normally I would have glanced at the sign, thought, "That's interesting," and moved on. But that day I stopped to think.

We are through with the first part of the Wheaton in Germany program, and are now all interns in Berlin. Most of us are working with a Christian organization - the Berliner Stadtmission - that among other things provides a waystation for refugees arriving in Berlin from the Balkans, the Middle East, and several countries in Africa. The day I explored that beautiful old neighborhood was my second day working in the kitchen and housekeeping in the Stadtmission's refugee center.

Finding this old center put what we're doing in a broader historical context. For thousands of years, people have fled from their homes as refugees to other countries, whether because of famine or war or persecution or oppressive regimes. These people did not start off as refugees. They lived normal lives - until their lives fell apart. The refugees cared for in the old Red Cross building were fleeing oppression. The ones I am serving now are trying to escape homelands torn apart by war or persecution. They all decided that things were so bad that they were willing to leave everything behind to start again somewhere else.

When refugees come to Berlin today, they are utterly disoriented. Most of them don't speak German. They are trying to figure out where they will stay, how they will eat, and what the next step is. The Stadtmission is one of the first places they are directed to. It provides food, shelter, recreation, and language lessons. The turnover there is fast - people usually stay only 3-4 days until moving on to the next station. The Stadtmission is a place for them to begin to figure out where to go next.

What I do at the Stadtmission is inglorious work. I hand out food, clean the kitchen, strip beds. It is inglorious, but it is necessary.  Someone asked me what my motivation is to work at the Stadtmission. The obvious answer is that I'm getting college credit for it. But honestly, that's not really a good enough reason to do menial labor for forty hours a week for four weeks. My real motivation, as for many of the people that volunteer at the Stadtmission, is faith. Volunteering at the Stadtmission is a form of washing feet - taking the love that Jesus has poured out on me and giving it to others in the form of humble service. This is the kind of service I as a Christian am called to do.

I mulled over all of this as I wandered through the Sudkreutz neighborhood of Berlin - I have a feeling I will pondering a lot more during the coming weeks of my internship.

lest we forget we are earning credit hours for this trip: presentations!

A key component of the Wheaton in Germany program is a Referat - group presentation. During the last month, each of us teamed up with another student to create a presentation about a given topic pertaining to German history and culture. We each became mini-experts on our topic, and then shared our knowledge with the rest of the group. The fun thing about these presentations is that we did not deliver them in a classroom: rather, they were given on-site in a location important to the theme.

Thus, Clementine and Nick taught us about gothic architecture and mysticism in the Frauenkirche in Munich. Anna and Bill stepped into the lives of three German inventors at Munich's Deutsches Museum - a fantastic, interactive technological museum. Allison and Henry told us about what daily life in the GDR was like, and then lead us into the DDR Museum, where we were able to poke around a typical East German apartment and take a seat in a Trabant car. And Tim and I presented on daily life in West Germany after WWII in the German Historical Museum in Berlin. Presenting on-site made the presentations memorable, as did the surprises some of the presenters had up their sleeves.

Clementine and Nick point out the finer details of this exquisite stained-glass window.

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (Bill) explains how he stumbled on x-ray technology.

Anna test drives a Trabbi with Allison and Kate as passengers after Allison and Henry's presentation.

Normal Sunday Afternoon Activities - Post by Clementine Kane

On Sunday afternoon, we visited Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp just outside Berlin. As we approached, our normally ebullient group fell quiet; it seemed as though a slow weight had dropped onto all of us. The weather preceeded us. A bright, muggy morning became a damp cloudy afternoon with rain occasionally falling from a blank grey sky – the fourth wall in this strange, triange-shaped camp. The camp is extensive, and since most of the barracks have been destroyed, it is flat and expansive, grey and dead-grass-green, surrounded by a high stone wall puncuated with watchtowers. Dense woods press up against the borders of the camp; the land is not at peace here. In its mechanical and mathematic geometry, it creates another formula for the destruction of a group of human beings. As perfectly devised and laid out as a never-built utopian city, the geometry here was used to subjugate, organize, diminish, and intimidate its unwilling residents.

Footsteps are imprinted in the fine gravel paths that run through the camp. They are transient markers of the past; as much the footsteps of the unlawful inmates that were once here as they are the remnants of the rememberers that leave them here today. They are a tangible reminder of how it might have been not so many years ago.

Exhibits and memorials have taken the place of barracks and guardrooms, but I didn’t spend much time there. The best way for me to engage and eventually come to terms with this place was to sit on a bench on the main courtyard and look out and imagine and grieve and ultimately, express gratitude for each life that passed through here and the protection my own family has experienced. This is very near history for me, more than the other people in our group. My dad’s dad was an Austrian Jew. Until the age of sixteen, he lived in Vienna with his grandmother. After a brush with the Nazi police there, though, he escaped on a train to England, and never saw any of his relatives again. It hit me like a brick in the face – this could so easily have been the fate of my grandfather, or my fate, had I been born a few years earlier. And this was undoubtedly the fate of people he knew or was even related to.

Unaswerable questions fly between my friend and me – Why? How is this– ? How could the people in the town stand by? How could someone hate a group of people so much? How did the SS officers that ran this camp live with themselves? Where was God in this?

As I walk through this place of willfully and strategically imposed suffering and death, my heart is a dead weight inside of me, unable to truly empathize but aching to understand. My curly brown hair and dark brown eyes are a brand linking my blood to this place and reminding me of what could have so easily transpired. Yet I am alive. And I will not waste my time on the inconsequential. I refuse to not love deeply and be loved. I refuse to be embroiled in hate, especially if it is petty. This is how I fight back.

Everyone had a different experience here; I can only share mine. Yet we all came away a little more aware of the potential of humanity, and sombered at what a Sunday afternoon could hold.

~~~

 This post was authored by Clementine Kane.

in Photos

There are so many things to write about from this trip that it's impossible to adequately capture it all. So while there are several posts in the works, this post is just to share some snippets of the last few weeks in photos. 

I convinced Allison that it was a good idea to split a smoked fish on the Fraueninsel. Although she was initially skeptical, we both ended up really enjoying it. And it's always fun to wave a fish skeleton around. 

This is a Sommerrodelbahn, a relatively common sight in the alps. It's almost impossible to describe, but the idea is sledding in the summer. There's a windy, hilly metal track, and you ride on it on the sleds, which have brakes so you can control speed. It's kind of like an alpine roller coaster. This one is in Garmisch.

We went to a museum in Augsburg about the Fuggers, an immensely powerful family during the High Middle Ages. At the time, Augsburg was Germany's Florence, and the Fuggers were comparable to the Medici. The museum has lots of interactive games designed for children, and some of us reveled in completing the challenges.

In Vienna we went to Schönbrunn, the summer residence of the Habsburgs. I think that Clementine was perhaps happier with her simple daisy crown than many of the Habsburg princesses and empresses. 

Of Operas

We had two-and-a-half days in Vienna this weekend. It was almost maddening to have so little time in such a magnificent city, but we packed in as much as we possibly could. The thing that I will remember most clearly is the opportunity to attend the Vienna City Opera, one of the greatest opera companies in the world.

On Saturday night, we all donned classy clothes brought specifically for this occasion, and headed out to see Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera, which premiered in Vienna more than two hundred years ago. Unlike most operas, Fidelio celebrates loyalty and married love, as the plot revolves around Leonore, a woman disguised as a man (Fidelio) in order to free her husband from unjust imprisonment. Also rare, the opera ends happily, with the downfall of the tyrant and the reunion of Leonore and Florestan. This particular production was superb (as one would expect from the Vienna Opera) and traditionally staged.

Simply being in the opera house was an experience. We were scattered throughout the audience, and most of us had the sixth seat in a box. The boxes are luxurious, with red velvet upholstery and an area behind the seats with a coat rack, but there is a catch. Being seated in a box at the opera sounds grand enough, the sixth seat is the one behind five other people, so if you want to actually see the opera instead of just hearing it you have to stand, kneel on your bar-stool-height chair, or, if you’re particularly determined, stand on your chair. It’s an adventure. During the intermission Anna and I decided to abandon our seats in boxes and go up to the nosebleeds section in the gallery – standing room only – where we had an excellent view of the second act.

After Fidelio, we thought we were through with our opera experience, but around noon on Sunday we realized that Götterdämmerung, the last part of Wagner’s four-part Ring cycle, was playing that afternoon, and Dr. Shaffer told us that anyone who wanted to go was welcome to. Going to Götterdämmerung is quite a commitment: the opera is four hours long with two half-hour intermissions. It started at four, and we knew that we wouldn’t be finished until 9:30. Three of us, Anna, Henry, and I, decided that we wanted to go. We bought standing-room tickets for the unbelievable price of 3 euros each. (3 euros! To see Götterdämmerung at the Vienna Opera!) Thankfully, we were able to find places with a ledge behind us, so during musical interludes were able to sit down and rest.

The opera was spectacular. Although I actually preferred the production and plot of Fidelio, the opportunity to experience the musical grandeur of a Wagner opera of epic proportions is like no other. It was especially meaningful for me, because I grew up hearing my grandmother telling stories about the Vienna opera and the splendor of Wagner. Based on German mythology, Götterdämmerung handles honor, betrayal, the return of a ring of power to its rightful owners (Rhine river maidens), and the twilight of the gods. The music and plot is so intense that I was ultimately glad the set was rather modern and minimalist – something more traditional might have resulted in sensory overload.

When the opera was through, we were all in awe. Being able to see not one, but two phenomenal operas in Vienna was a surreal and unforgettable part of the trip.

Greetings from Deutschland!

The Wheaton in Germany program is well underway! The group (eight students plus Dr. Shaffer) has been together for the last two and a half weeks, and we've been in Munich for just over a week. In that time, we've packed in so much that several of our host families can't believe we've done so much. One of my new catchphrases is "I can relax in America," to help me remember that being a little tired is totally worth the experience of spending almost two months in Germany.

Fraueninsel

We hit the ground running. We arrived in Munich last Wednesday, and on Thursday we went to the Fraueninsel, an island in the Chiemsee, one of the largest lakes in Germany. There, a nun named Sister Hannah gave us a tour of the Benedictine Abbey Frauenwörth. There have been nuns in this Abbey for 1,230 years without interruption, and the first Abbess known by name was Irmgard, the granddaughter of Charlemagne. (Fraueninsel means "women's island," a result of the Abbey's existence.)

We were enchanted by ducklings on the Fraueninsel.

Friday, we visited the salt mines in Berchtesgaden and then spent the afternoon in Salzburg, known for being the city of Mozart and of The Sound of Music. It was also the center of power of a powerful Archbishop during the Middle Ages. It's a fairytale city, and it was delightful to wander through its streets and skip through the Mirabell Gardens singing "Do a Deer." (Yes, Kate and Anna did do that.) Henry, Allison, Anna and Kate all reached the parapet of the fortress overlooking the city just as all the bells in the city began to toll 6 pm. That was one of the highlights of the trip so far.

Saturday we took the train to Garmisch for what Dr. Shaffer termed "a short Alpine hike." It ended up being approximately 11,5 km and 4 hours long. But although it was longer than expected, and some of us were a bit chagrined to be hiking for so long, the experience and beauty of the Alps was well worth the exertion. We wandered through a narrow gorge through which the Partnach river rushes, and as I heard the water thundering I thought of Revelation 19:6, 

"Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out, 'Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.'"

view of Garmisch-Partenkirchen

We have done much more since then, visiting a Lutheran church, becoming familiar with the Munich public transit system, taking train trips to Augsburg (to learn about the mighty Fugger family) and Nuremberg, and observing the Corpus Christi procession today in Munich. I think that for most of us it is only just beginning to sink in that we are in Germany. It's an incredible place with incredible people, and spending a summer here learning about German culture and history is going to be fascinating. Equally importantly, throughout the program we will be staying with Christian host families in Munich and Berlin, experiencing daily family life and getting to know German believers is an incredible privilege.

Fronleichnam [Corpus Christi] Procession in Munich

[parenthetical note: I hope to have more photos of the group up soon, once I get access to the photos that Dr. Shaffer's taken.]