Excerpt from my last paper for 20th Century German Politics

Before coming to Berlin, I had mixed ideas of what I thought Germany was. The first time I came to Germany, I passed through in a car from France to Italy, stopping only in Cologne to see a “Dom” that was heavily under construction, and beer with sauerkraut and pork knuckles. I was thoroughly unimpressed as a 13 year old. The second time I visited Germany I had only seen the sites around Dresden and Munich, and even then my sole purpose for coming to Germany was to see the “Sistine Madonna” in Dresden, while my father wanted to see the beer halls, or the many “Bierpalast” in Munich. So essentially, when I pictured Germany, what did I see? Neuschwanstein Castle, beer, rundown cathedrals, and Sistine Madonna.

Initially my plans to study abroad were in Florence, as the NYU curriculum there included many of my required business courses, only to have my visa application rejected because of a missing form and horrible Italian bureaucracy. Two weeks before the start of the program—I switched in, and so, I did not prepare for Germany like the other students did; I did not brush up on my German history, nor did I start learning German. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, until on September 1, 2009 I arrived to a dark rainy Berlin not knowing what to expect. I had high hopes for some delicious salty pretzels and perhaps some goulash like they had in Munich, but to my dismay, I eventually learned that Berlin was in the state of Brandenburg—not Bavaria.

As for my political thoughts of Germany, I had always severely isolated what I had learned in History classes from what I had thought of the people today. Perhaps I was simply just ignorant of what culture and humanity is—a development of what was given to us by our ancestors, into something we will pass down to future generations. Yes, I had learned about the Holocaust and read many books like Anne Frank’s Diary and Night, but as a youth I never really put anything together. I had knowledge of the concentration camps and Hitler, but I always naturally gave the world the benefit of the doubt that things had changed, and that the Germany of today is unrelated to the Germany of the past.