Day 0 - Susan's Prologue: Trying to "Get It"

I travel because I am still trying to “Get It”

In 5^th grade, we learned about the Berlin Wall.  The wall had fallen the year before, right around the time of my sister Katherine’s birthday.  The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, and her birthday is on November 10, which is when we would have heard the news from the day before.  I’ll always associate her birthday with the falling of the Berlin Wall, not that the two otherwise have anything to do with each other!

My 5^th grade teacher was really into us celebrating German heritage. She had us celebrate Oktoberfest and a speaker came and passed around pieces of the Berlin wall. It was surreal, handling this chunk of concrete in my hand with some spray paint on it.  I remember it crumbled more and more it as it made its way to everyone’s desks, and we were embarrassed to mess up this speaker’s piece of the wall, but the speaker assured us it was a good thing that it kept crumbling.

Source: http://binap3.edu.glogster.com/the-berlin-wall-/

The word "Germany," to a fifth grader who had never been outside the U.S., didn’t carry a lot of meaning for me. Hearing things like “occupation,” the falling of a huge concrete wall that people had been shot for trying cross – this was as foreign to me as the sounds of the German language itself, even if English is a Germanic language.   The Berlin Wall didn't make sense, either.

To say I didn’t “get it” at the time would be an understatement. 

The following year in school lead to more information about the puzzles posed by this faraway continent: we read The Diary of Anne Frank.  Both touching the Berlin Wall and reading the words of Anne Frank led to a curiosity that sprouted in me to try to understand. 

Flash forward 20+ years and I’m married to a wonderful man whose family knows Germany really well, as well as its language.  And I’ve been to Europe a few times with him and can’t wait to go back.  And this time I am finally going to Berlin, whose wall I held in my hands back when I was 10 years old and couldn’t comprehend its meaning, other than knowing that the wall crumbling was a good thing.

Even as an adult there’s always going to be an aspect of the struggles these people went through that won’t make sense to me, whether trying to understand the world wars, the Holocaust, the Iron Curtain, etc. Even in our own fair city of Atlanta and country there have been conflicts that happened in the past that simply baffle me - Civil War, Civil Rights (neither of which were particularly civil).  What a testament to the work and struggles of people in the far-reaching past and more-recent past that we can now freely travel and express how we feel about the things in the past.  While I despair that I can't change things that happened, I comfort myself that I am at least trying to understand and not look away, so I can one day share with others that it’s a good thing that there is peace, that walls crumble. 

Fulfilling a journey I'd wanted to take since 6th grade: Standing on the main road through the concentration camp in Dachau in 2009

I am excited to be going back to Munich, too, so familiar to me now and of course steeped in history I similarly don’t “get.”  I can’t wait to see familiar faces of our loved ones – family and friends-who-are-now-family.   I love that Josef and I share this experience together. Thanks for following us on our journey!