The past three weeks almost seem like a dream now that we are back in the United States. I learned more on this trip than any class I have ever taken in my lifetime. However, I think that we only scratched the surface on the events that took place in these countries during the reign of Communism. All of these countries were effected drastically by the Soviets coming in and the Communists taking control, but each in their own way.
The country I found the most interesting was Germany. It is amazing to me how much this country has been through and has still recuperated fairly well. The more I learned about the German people from going to the Reichstag and talking to former East German journalists at the ZZB institute, the deeper the respect I gained for them grew. At the Reichstag, our guide told us that there are no paintings or any kind of representation of former German leaders inside the building because the government does not want to display any kind of nationalism. He said they do this because nationalism has been a problem in the past with Germany. I understand their reasoning behind this, but I wonder how different the US would be if it were more like this. Would be a weak country? Isn't our nationalism one of the biggest pieces holding Americans together? We may not have extreme nationalism like the Germans had at one point, but it is present. With this in mind, I formed a respect for Germans because it must be hard for them to try and forget their past and move to a stronger future for their country.
Then when we went to the ZZB institute to talk to the former East German Journalists, we got a much bigger incite to what life was life to Germans who had been through big parts of the past that Germany is trying to recover from. The eldest journalist is the one that I was really interested in. His parents were Communists during the Nazi reign and his mother was sent to a concentration camp for it. Then when the Communists took over East Germany, he moved there with his father. He was a journalist during this time and talked about what happened to him when he wrote something the government did not like. It was very interesting to me to meet this man because he had been through most of Germany's grim history.
Talking to the journalist really let you know how suppressed East Germany was. One of them was a foreign correspondent in Russia during Gorbachev's time as General Secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. However, he was not allowed to report on Gorbachev's glasnost or perestroika. The journalists were only allowed to report on what the government wanted them to report on and there were extreme punishments for people who did not do as they were told.
This trip taught us all how little we know about Communism here in America. Some of the things we uncovered were chilling. The degree at which spies worked for the government is way worse than we knew. However, the people did have some freedoms while living under Communism and they were far better than we expected, though they still were not that good.
Morgan Weaver
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