Last month, I had to get away from it all in Berlin and thus headed south to Frankfurt! No, I really did have to - my exchange program's mid-year seminar was on the agenda, and all 75 American participants were required to train into Frankfurt so we could discuss our experiences and reflect on the past half-year. While a week of discussions and lectures may not sound like a lot of fun, it was actually a great experience and I was happy I could reconnect and catch up with all my other American friends in the program.
The first few days were a whirlwind, and it all started with the downright depressing news I shared in my last post. But being able to spend some time during our first few nights together in a beer hall and Irish pub picked our spirits right back up. On the business side of things, during the daytime, we heard more and more about each other's experiences. We rated our current overall mood, and I'm happy to report that everyone rated themselves either happy or (like me) very happy - we had no neutral or negative ratings! It was good to see my compatriots are enjoying Germany like I am. I also learned some interesting tidbits about what some other program participants are going through:
- One participant has had to move a total of four times already, due to being shuffled between temporary housing arrangements (as a reminder, I have moved once)
- One participant lives in a host family that consists of eight children, two parents, and two nannies
- One participant shares an apartment with a 55-year-old and a 65-year-old retiree. Both roommates are German and have an entire large drawer in the kitchen dedicated full-time to the storage of potatoes, a staple of the German diet
- One participant's host family, as it turns out, are members of the radical right-wing, anti-Islamic PEGIDA movement that has been making negative headlines lately and whose ideas are almost universally deplored throughout the country as being intolerant and racist. Oops.
These, of course, were just the interesting anomalies. Almost every participant, including me of course, has not had to deal with any such challenges or unique living situations.
Despite the goings-on at the seminar, I still managed to squeeze in a tiny bit of picture-taking, of course.
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| It was my second time walking around Frankfurt's Old Town. The first was way back in August |
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| This market square, Römerberg, was the birthplace of the city. The first trade fairs were held here in the 12th century, and the Gothic red-and-white Nikolai Church on the right dates back to the same time period. The entire square was destroyed in WWII |
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| Inside a church close to our hostel called the Dreikönigskirche, built in the Neo-Gothic Style from 1875 to 1880 |
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| St. Paul's Church was where the first German Constitution was drafted in 1848, which paved the way for a united Germany in 1871. It was completely destroyed during WWII but quickly rebuilt, as it is considered a symbol of freedom and democracy |
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| The inside is nothing special. It is more of an assembly hall than a church today |
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| Another one of Frankfurt's main squares, this one is dominated by the Hauptwache on the left, built in 1730 for the city militia |
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| That was about it as far as Frankfurt's small Old Town goes. Here, Frankfurt's many skyscrapers tower over the Main River. The city is Germany's undisputed banking capital, and it's been that way since the mid-1700s |
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| The Eiserner Steg bridge |
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| Why does Frankfurt look so much more modern than other German cities? First, it has more skycrapers than any other city in the country. And second, after the destruction of WWII, many German cities established commissions to debate the rebuilding strategy - should they restore the old towns, or bulldoze and go modern? Much of Munich looks old since that city went for the former option. Frankfurt, not so much, since it went for the latter |
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| Frankfurt's main train station is the counry's busiest. Completed in 1890, figures representing Apollo, steam power, and electricity hold up a globe on the facade |
Wednesday was hands-down the best day, as we took a bus trip into the countryside and headed outdoors for a tour of Point Alpha. That meant two things - learning about German history and taking pictures, two of my favorite activities! Point Alpha was a Cold War observation post on the West German-East German border. Manned by the United States military from the 1960s to 1991, the post is located in what is known as the Fulda Gap. See the pictures below to see why that is significant!
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| Point Alpha, as mentioned above, was built right up against the border between East Germany and West Germany. Since I had only been learning about how the Berlin Wall divided Berlin, I had never thought about what border reinforcements might be along the rest of the East Germany-West Germany border. Well, starting in 1952, they were similarly deadly and brutal. Naturally, there were different generations of fences, which you can see below. East German border guards were awarded 8,000 Ostmarks, or roughly $2,300, for every escapee they shot. For some time, guns like the one pictured were mounted on the last version of the border fence. When a would-be escapee tripped the gun's trigger wire, the gun would spray a cloud of metal shrapnel at him. The guns were eventually taken off the fence as a condition for West Germany giving a loan to East Germany |
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| A mockup of an early Soviet blockade |
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| The border fence was at first just barbed wire |
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| The barbed wire fence eventually evolved to two barbed wire fences that had underground mines between them. This mockup, thankfully, had no such mines |
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| An original East German guard tower directly across from the American observation tower |
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| The border fence's final design. The concrete barrier in the foreground prevented escapees from driving into the fence to knock it over. The fence itself had small openings that were too small for fingers to fit through, and it extends underground to prevent tunnels from being dug underneath it. No mockups here - this is all original material. Of course, it was expensive to build, guard, and maintain this entire border fence apparatus, so the East German economy suffered |
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| The American observation tower on the West German side of the border was manned 24/7. At least eighty soldiers staffed Point Alpha on 40 day rotations |
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| A view of the Fulda Gap from the American observation tower, with the fence in the foreground. Americans knew that if the Russians and East Germans were ever to invade West Germany, it would occur right here, since at this point the East-West border juts westward. Therefore, the Americans built the Point Alpha observation point to keep an eye out for incoming troops. After the war, detailed Russian plans were found that revealed the Americans were right: in the event of war, Russian troops and tanks would flood the border crossing here and make their way towards Frankfurt, just 84 miles away. Their goal: take Frankfurt's airport, the busiest and largest in the country |
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| If the Russians and East Germans ever invaded, then the Americans at Point Alpha would immediately helicopter back to Frankfurt, pick up nuclear explosives, helicopter back to here on the border, and plant the explosives on the side of all roads in order to blow up the encroaching Russian tanks. It would be an important but suicidal mission. Therefore, American soldiers were relieved when their rotation at Point Alpha was over and they could be stationed somewhere safer |
After our awesome and informative tour of Point Alpha, we headed to the nearby town of Geisa to hear from "contemporary witnesses," who were two Germans willing to tell us about their experiences in East and West Germany. Our first witness, a former West German border guard, told us (in German) how he fled from the East to the West with his family when he was a kid, back when the fence was weakly guarded. When he later became a West German border guard, he learned more about the East German border security system. He relayed to us, for instance, that there was a restricted zone that extended for 5 kilometers from the border into East German territory. Only inhabitants were allowed to be in this zone and any prospective visitors to the zone had to apply for entry. If you behaved suspiciously or if you were thought to be "ideologically unreliable," you could be evicted from the zone at any time. At least 11,000 East Germans experienced such forced displacements. But the craziest story he told us went as follows: one day, East German guards yelled at him and his fellow West German guards to back up from the (then small) fence, and fired warning shots. Instinctively, a West German guard shot back and killed an East German guard, as his bullet went through the East German's right eye. Years after the German reunification, in 1998, the same former West German guard was running his own taxi business. One day, he was found dead on the ground by his taxi. Nothing had been stolen from him. He had been shot in the right eye.
The East German witness told us, also in German, how she would never want to live under the East German government again, but there were certain positives - namely the social safety net, the fact that it cost the equivalent of $10 a month to rent an apartment, and that unemployment was (officially) zero. There was, however, always a shortage of common consumer goods. She also found out in the years after reunification that the Stasi had a file on her, as they had been reading and photocopying her letters from West German relatives without her knowledge. She also knew of an East Gemran woman who voiced some anti-East German sentiments, and her own husband reported her to the authorities. That led to a jail sentence for his wife, and her case was far from an anomaly. When it came time for reunification, for some East Germans, it was a shock to go from a life where your schooling and career was planned out for you to a life where you had freedom of choice. She named her son as an example, who started going down the wrong path after reunification and ended up doing a stint in jail.
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| Geisa |
After our busy but informative and interesting day out in the countryside around Frankfurt, we had some time off to unwind in, where else, a karoake bar.
The rest of our seminar was largely uneventful, other than a visit from the Consul-General for Frankfurt, one of very top U.S. Department of State officials in Germany. It was my second time meeting him, as he had talked with a group of us who had visited Frankfurt in August. And it was refreshing to hear once more from a government representative how they value our work as citizen ambassadors. Now all that's left is to convince the rest of the State Department that our program is worth saving! In case you haven't, please visit http://savecbyx.org/ and sign the petition to restore our program's full budget for upcoming years.
After our week together of sharing our experiences and learning even more about German history, it was time for us to part. I said bye to my friends, but I wasn't ready to return to Berlin just yet. Instead, it was off to see the city of Nuremberg, Germany for my first time. Pictures from there coming right up!
