By Hannah Pierce When my class and I visited Berlin, I was surprised to see monuments to the city’s past wrongs everywhere. Everywhere I looked, there were stepping stones to commemorate the deportation of the city’s Jewish residents, signs about historical discriminatory laws, and monuments to past atrocities. I also found Berlin to be a […]
By Sarah Mowrer Studying Central Europe in this program often involves being in the same space while recognizing that it has undergone several fundamental changes throughout history. Space is a geographical location that exists in our minds through observation and memory of physical remnants. I was able to observe the development of these spaces across […]
By SY Cheng Did you know? Wroclaw is referred to as the “Silicon Valley of Poland”? Upon arriving in Wroclaw, I noticed multiple big companies in the city, notably Google near the Plac Bema, Toyota and Nokia, which we pass by daily on Tram 23. Seeing those big names in Wroclaw shocked me a bit […]
By Blake Wilson The Biskupin archaeological site in Poland is tied to the Lusatian peoples found in Central and Eastern Europe from around the 1250s BCE. Famous for their fine jewelry and other burial goods such as deformed blades, the Lusatians are a member of the broader Pan-European Urnfield cultures known for the cremation of their […]
By Cara Williams Prior to my stay in Berlin, I had low expectations for the city. I was told to expect a lot of concrete and prepared myself for a drab city covered in haunted memorials. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to find that although the city blocks were not always vibrant, the people certainly […]
By Jack Yoon In the words of Karl Scheffler, a German art critic in 1910, “Berlin is a city condemned always to become, never to be.”1 Through his words, Berlin is a city built through constant change, whose identity is never fully being something, but rather always becoming, continuously moving forwards and backwards across time. […]
By Ella Roerden As the Nazis saw it, the Czech population needed punishing. Czech underground forces were responsible for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler’s most trusted and most valuable officials who also served as the “Protector” of Bohemia and Moravia, the Nazi-occupied region that today is the Czech Republic. On June 4, […]
By Jack Yoon When studying the Holocaust, there is a generalized narrative that all Jews were either sent to a camp, trapped in a ghetto, or hidden away from society. In our understanding of the Holocaust today, there is little recognition of Jews who changed their identity as a means to survive. Since the majority of […]
By SY Cheng When I first visited the Warsaw Uprising Museum, all I expected was photographs, documents, uniforms, and resistance narratives. I was surprised at the extent of how the uprising was backed by early communicative technology and wartime intelligences. Amongst all the weaponry and personal stories curated in the museum, I was caught off […]
By Hannah Pierce One day in Wrocław, as I was riding home from frisbee practice in my teammate Piotr’s car, he asked me a question: “What do you think of the Polish people?” This was not my first time receiving this question. When I was in Krakow, my handyman from back home, Arthur, texted me […]