I LOVE Berlin: Part Two

My thesis is due in exactly one week, and now that it's crunch time, the prospect of packages is the only thing keeping me from insanity. Oh, and free food. Which reminds me--tomorrow my Memories and Legacies of the Holocaust class gets to attend a *free dinner* alongside Holocaust survivor and German literature critic Ruth Kluger. I am currently reading her memoir, "Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered," which covers her experience as a young girl living in concentration camps. (This is really big for me because the only other time I was ever invited to a special dinner by the college it turned out to be a mistake and they revoked my invitation. Ever since I've been a little bitter, but hopefully tomorrow night's dinner will make up for my sophomore year tragedy.)

As you all should know, I spent my Spring Break in Berlin. As I mentioned in a previous post, the final assignment for the class is a collaborative project between the German students and my classmates that will be presented via video conference in late April. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'm terribly excited to create a final project (it is work, after all, and I have serious senioritis), but the really cool part is that the German students are currently visiting us in New York to explore some Holocaust memorials in the city and to work on the final projects.

The Germans arrived last Thursday and have probably been about as busy as my class was when we visited them in Berlin (which means non-stop action from morning to evening). But over the weekend my class organized a party for both groups to socialize, and Saturday night a few of the German students spent some time at the seniors 50 nights party at the Alumnae House, which is the college's hotel. It's been a really unusual experience for me, coming from a small suburban town in Ohio, to have the opportunity to socialize with so many people from another country. While a good amount of international students attend Vassar each year, I know very few of them because up until recently most of them lived in the same dorm, and it's rare to have more than just a few in your classes--although I did have a friend from Bosnia who I visited in his hometown of Sarajevo when I was JYA last year.

My group, which consists of myself, one other American student, and three German students, is doing a project comparing Holocaust memorials in Berlin and New York (very uplifting project, I know). You can read about it here!

What is interesting about the course is that it is not actually about the Holocaust (of course, we did read a book on the history of the Holocaust for background information), but is more of a theoretical study on the memorials themselves. I think it's a cool topic (in a depressing sort of way) because the way things are remembered was never something I had considered before, but now I find myself analyzing memorials all the time, for better or for worse. [Insert joke about Holocaust memorials here---yeah, not easy to make funny.]

So yeah. I'll try not to flip out completely this weekend and keep you updated on whether or not the final draft of my thesis makes sense. Yikes!