Greenhills sample wonderful delights of Berlin
ON a recent senior history trip to Berlin the 5th and 6th Year students of Our Lady’s College Greenhills received a thorough education on the vast and complex past of Germany. Students lucky enough to have partaken in the trip will certainly not be forgetting it, and its subsequent lessons, any time soon.
Regardless of the brief nature of the trip, only 4 days, the students managed to fit in more than seemed possible. From the Jewish Museum with its emotive art installations to the fascinating insights gained into Nazi Germany in the Topography of Terror, every place visited had something new to learn.
A common theme among many of the tour guides was to encourage young people, to look at the world today and the injustices taking place, some of which may have an unnerving similarity to Nazi Germany or the GDR. The refugee crisis, the rise of the alt-right and fervent nationalism that has culminated in Donald Trump, Turkey’s uneasy slide towards authoritarianism, the way in which Vladimir Putin is running Russia which now apparently authorises concentration camps for LGBT+ people in Chechnya, unfortunately the list of worldwide injustices is still long and far-reaching.
But Germany is a real-life example of how, against all odds, things can change, and countries can become open, modern and progressive.