Sunday, August 26, 2012

Assignment 1: My reasons for going to Germany


I have several reasons for choosing Germany to travel to over Dterm:

1)  I’ve travelled outside of the U.S. several times to Asia, but I’ve never been to Europe.  My sister has been to Germany and Finland, and I’ve been to Japan and China.  I’ve actually travelled more than she has, but for some reason I’ve always been jealous of her because she got to go to Europe.

2)  A friend and I also planned to travel to Germany on a Dterm trip together (Sam Saurez, she’s going on this trip).  We planned to go our sophomore year (2010), but I ended up going on the China/Japan trip instead.  Our junior year, neither of us could afford, so now is our last chance!

I’m also German on my father’s side (I don’t know what year our family immigrated from Germany, but I think it was the early 1900’s), but the German heritage kind of disappeared behind my mom’s Japanese heritage.

I also love historical sites.  Anything old is really, really cool.  And Germany is definitely a historical country.

For example:

My sister visited the Neuschwanstein Castle.  It was built in the late 1880’s by King Ludwig II, but after his death the castle’s construction ceased and it’s, essentially, an unfinished castle.
How can something so beautiful be unfinished?  It certainly doesn’t look like it.
I actually just read on this website that King Ludwig II built it to hide from society.  Funny thing is, the castle’s so magnificent I think it’s created the opposite effect.


Other than Germany’s beautiful and historic castles, buildings, etc., the country is also known for the brutality of the Nazi Regime during WWII.  German history during WWII is one of the most horrific events in history, and is certainly the most discussed during teachings of WWII.  This photo is of Auschwitz in Poland, but it’s the most recognizable and it does the trick to getting my point across.

The point of the photo is so I can introduce “dark tourism” (a term I learned just recently during my study in Hiroshima this summer).  It is defined as; people who travel to specific locations because death, destruction, etc. took place there (such as the concentration camps and Hiroshima and Nagasaki).  Such places attract thousands of people because they want to see these dark, depressing places.

And I am one of those people…I love WWII history because it depicts the horribleness of human nature and how easy it is for people to kill other people, especially the justification of killing thousands of innocent people all over the world (The Nazi’s justified the extermination and imprisonment of the Jewish people, homosexuals, and political and war criminals because it threatened the existence of the Aryan race and Hitler’s view of Germany, just as the U.S. justified the imprisonment of Japanese Americans along the west coast and the use of atomic bombs on Japan’s civilian cities).

All in all, I really want to go to Germany to learn about its heritage and long history.

Word count:  504

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