Deutsches Historisches Museum

So as I mentioned before, Thursday was spent at the DHM, which was the best museum I'd ever been to (until Friday, when it got knocked down to 2nd place!).  We had a guided tour through the late 20th century exhibit, which consisted of the Nazi era/WWII and the Cold War.  Since those are the two topics I've spent the most academic time learning about (interestingly, since I'm not even a history major), I clearly enjoyed the exhibit very much.

The way they presented the history was very conducive to quick but quality learning for those who are less familiar with that time frame.  When we got to one part of our tour, our guide reminded us the book burnings that occurred in 1933 at the start of the Nazi regime's rule.  (A quick history for you: they made it a national policy to burn all books by Jewish, gay, and communist authors, among others.  These burnings took place publicly, to drum up support for this propaganda movement).  He reminded us that this book burning took place right across the street, in the plaza between the National Opera and the Humboldt Law building. I walk by that plaza many times each week, and it blew my mind to think that that happened there.  It's so incredibly interesting being in places where so much history has taken place.

Another part of the exhibit that I appreciated most was the amount of primary documents it contained.  We saw things like the Treaty of Versailles (the treaty that ended WWI), German Marks (the currency that became worthless in the early 1930s), the Nuremberg Laws (those were written by the Nazi party to define who qualifies as Jewish), and Nazi uniforms.  Again, having spent so much time studying these things, it was crazy to see them in person.

The atrium inside of the DHM. It survived the WWII bombings, amazingly.

THE Treaty of Versailles

German Marks

You can find some more photos on my Flickr page or facebook, as usual.

The Cold War history we went through pretty quickly, but it was interesting as well.  We only covered one section of the 1st floor of this museum, so needless to say I will have to make several trips back so that I can see everything!

We ended the day by watching the movie Luther (auf Deutsch) at IES to have a little historical background on the next day's trip to Wittenberg.  As a Christian, I felt a little ashamed to have not paid much attention to all the times I've learned about him in history class, but it's just because don't really find much interest in history outside of 1933-1989.   Anyway, turns out he was a really awesome guy, as you will see in the next post!