Exploring Germany: Togetherness From Tragedy
Exploring Germany: Togetherness From Tragedy
I am writing this now at the very end of my experience studying abroad in Germany. This experience wraps up a very busy and travel-filled first half of 2026, since just a few months ago, I was wrapping up a four-month long exchange program in Japan.
These two experiences had many differences, just by principle. Japan is in Asia; Germany is in Europe. Most people in Japan don’t speak English; most people in Germany do. Food in Japan was very healthy and light; Food in Germany was much heartier and heavier. But for all the differences I found, there were equally as many similarities. Transport in both countries was similar, with narrow roads and efficient trains and buses that allowed for convenient travel. Perhaps more importantly, however, both nations share a history of tragedy and conflict. This shared history some of my most impactful experiences abroad, and this brings me to my experience at the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany.
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This was a part of the program-included trip to Weimar in the state of Thuringia. We had a city tour the previous day. Our tour guide was well-informed on the rich and long history of the city. He explained, “Though Weimar is a city with only about 70,000 people, it has maintained a large degree of importance from medieval times to today.”
This importance is largely lent to political importance, but I thought the more interesting part of Weimar’s history was the art and cultural richness which accompanied the city. As a musician, it was especially exciting to learn that Franz Liszt, a virtuoso composer and pianist from the 19th century, had lived in Weimar and started a music school which is still there today. As we stood in front of that same school, peering over the ornate fence into the yard, which was full of flowers and trees, music poured out of the open windows of practice rooms—piano and cello melodies coming from practicing students.
It was a stark contrast to the following day, when we loaded up onto a bus to see the concentration camp. Buchenwald was a mere fifteen kilometers away from the Franz Liszt music school and the continually blossoming cultural hub of Weimar. It was also a bleak day with fog covering the environment throughout the cold morning. Many had commented that the poor weather set the mood well.
The bus pulled into the parking lot, and it was as though a weight had set over the entire area. The fog thickened, as our tour started. We started in a complex of office buildings which ended up being reused from the original camp. Now, the workers in those buildings help to spread awareness and uncover sites around Weimar which were hidden by the Nazis. After discussing the historical context behind Buchenwald, we travelled through a dark forest, which eventually opened to the entrance gate to Buchenwald.
On the gate, it said (in German), “To each his own.” This was a notable difference from most other camps, such as Auschwitz, which say, “Work makes you free.” As the tour guide explained, though, both statements have a similarly cruel irony. In most other work and death camps, “free” is more interpreted to mean death than actual freedom, as the Nazi war machine would extract all the labor they could out of the prisoners. “To each his own” is perhaps crueler, as unlike “Work makes you free”, there is not even the illusion of escape. In this context, “To each his own” could be interpreted to mean that the Nazis are somehow poking fun at their prisoners, saying it was their own actions and biology that got them into the camp, and that they had to be punished for being their own person that didn’t fit an “Aryan” mold.
We turned left from the entrance gate, traveling deep into the forest. As we did, the rain and fog became increasingly thick. We stayed close to each other to conserve heat, and at once we stopped in front of some ruins. “For the first few years of the camp, this was used as a horse stable,” Our guide shouted over the rain, “But after that, in 1941, Soviet prisoners were brought to the camp, but they never saw any more than this stable. Under the guise of the building being a doctor’s office, over 8,000 prisoners were brought into this building and killed.” The shocking visceral cruelty and scale of the tragedy that had unfolded in front of me chilled me more than any rain could.
Suddenly the guide pointed and said, “Look over there.” There was a deer standing in the road. It looked at us for a few seconds before dashing into the forest.
As we walked back to the main camp, the tour guide spoke, “This whole place used to be forest. Deer like that and birds called this place home, and it was just like any other piece of Earth. But now, the earth here is scarred with tragedy. There was hardly any wildlife here for a long time, so it is good to see the forest return, at least a little.”
After the end of the end of the tour, the weather cleared up. It was almost harrowing how sudden it was—as quick as the rain began, it lifted. Sunbeams began to show through the clouds. Before I walked out the gate, I looked out once more across the main area of the camp. Most of it was empty. Looters had taken the raw materials—including those from the barracks—immediately after the war. Even still, it was as though the phantoms of the 270,000 people who died in Buchenwald were still there, and it was not at all difficult to visualize how it looked like during the Second World War. Buchenwald was built on a mild hill slope, and the environment around it was similarly mild hills. As the fog cleared, there were windmills, fields, and towns visible from the entrance of the camp. I stared at this view, standing within a place of captivity and looking out into the metaphorical and physical embodiment of a freer place, imagining how the prisoners of Buchenwald would likely have looked out in longing, imagining the same freedom that I could see just beyond this scarred forest.
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As I said before, Japan shared a cruel history with Germany, and I had gotten to see another display there in the form of the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima. This park had a museum which was similarly impactful and harrowing, but I did notice some difference in a societal response to such tragedy. Japan has had a powerful anti-war social movement after the war which continues today, but Germany’s response to the war could be considered perhaps even more societally pervasive.
Throughout my four weeks in Germany, I noticed numerous times a cautiousness and awareness exhibited by German people that I had never seen before. Both regarding today and their history, I believe that German people recognize the danger and harm of nationalist militarism. The care they take to ensure that Germany, as a nation, can atone for the crimes their nation had committed is unrivaled. As an American, I realize now that I similarly wish that we could have this same type of awareness and empathy as a society so that we, too, can avoid repeating tragedy.
Still, Germany is not perfect. Movements like the far-right AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) show that there is still much work to be done to increase societal awareness, but even today, 87% of German youth agree that that work needs to be done (Statistic from Deutsches Haus Bonn). I think in this area, there is certainly hope for continued remembrance, and there is still much to be learned from Germany and Japan in both nations’ efforts.
