Back from Germany

I just got back from Germany where I enjoyed visiting Berlin and Frankfurt with a friend from Canada. Monday and today were beautiful, sunny days which helped appreciate the tour!

Bicycling in Berlin was a lot of fun, going up to the Alexander Platz TV Tower as well.

But to me Berlin seemed really a place dedicated to memory: memory of the war, memory of the country's partition and the famous Wall, memory of the Shoah of course. It is amazing how many monuments, memorials and sculptures one finds, each having a precise symbolic value.

Here are just a few examples of what we came upon in less than a day:
- The Shoah memorial, incredibly large and the result of ten years of reflection.
- In front of the Reichstag, a memorial to the 96 members of the Parliament deported by the nazis, indicating for each one the prison or concentration camp in which they died.
- Streches of the Wall.
- The Reichstag's modern cuppola emerging from the old building (I didn't see the exhibition inside unfortunately).
- Visiting the "New Synagogue" (inaugurated in 1866, destroyed, not by the nazis but by allied bombings, in 1943), one can walk in the front part and go up to the cuppola seeing exactly what was left after the war and what is new, while the rear of the building, where the services where held, is now a courtyard with the pillars and the choir hinted on the ground.
- Near the KaDeWe department store, just outside an U-Bahn station, a list of the concentration camps on a post. Why there? No idea but there must be a reason.

I think Germany could bring a lot of its experience about how to preserve memory to Cambodia: but of course the amounts of money that can be dedicated to that here and there are not comparable.

I hope I can settle down a little bit with my parents and rest now that I'm back in Paris.