Day 3

There's a movie on TV right now about a little boy during the Nazi regime whose father was publicly executed for not supporting the Nazis, it seems, and who has just had to kill his own horse who was shot in the leg in the process of an effort to get the little boy's non-Aryan friend across some border. But as intense as this movie is, the relevance it has to everything we've talked about today and the things we learned so far in Germany has not escaped me. First, while it is very common to discuss the pain and distress that the Nazi regime inflicted on Jews, Gypsies, and pretty much the rest of the world before, during, and after World War II, this is the first time I'm seeing an emphasis placed on how much pain some of those who were deemed "of Aryan decent" and were safe may have also suffered. This poor little 12 year old is having is entire life torn apart even though he technically was on the safe side of it all. Second, seeing atrocities through movies somehow makes them more atrocious. The museum of German history presented events in a very learnable and understandable way, but watching it in movie form seems to be the exclamation point at the end of everything we learned today that makes the history even more horrific. Third, and on a lighter note, I'm quite proud that I understood this much from a movie that was completely in German. At first, hearing the words "bitte" and "nein" was pretty darn exciting, but then the story just started carrying itself and somehow transcended the language barrier. (Granted, having no German translator here does present the possibility that I've misinterpreted this whole movie, but I like to think that I haven't.)
I'm quite satisfied with what I've been getting out of this trip so far. You wonder how much you can learn in the period of three weeks through a course that should be taught over a semester, but I'm feeling this multifaceted accumulation of knowledge that is really unparalleled by any traditional method of learning. In addition to lectures that are so immediately practical right before I enter medical school, I'm learning about culture, language, people, travel, and a lot of other things that can't be titled. I'm really looking forward to visiting Cologne today and getting a second dose of cultural inundation.