Hamburg

What are people from Hamburg called?

Hamburgers. Seriously. I learned that this weekend on my visit to Hamburg, Germany with a class. We got in fairly late in the day on Saturday after a bus ride, a ferry ride, and more of a bus ride. I had a brief moment of fear on the ferry to Germany when I realized that I had forgotten to bring my passport with me. However, I crossed the border into Germany without incident. (Along with my passport, I forgot my camera, so sadly there will be none of my own pictures accompanying this blog post, just some links from Google). I like about Europe, how you can just pass from one country to another with absolutely no border control. Another really cool thing about the ferry was that they put a train onto the ferry! Seriously, in Denmark, the track went right up to and on the ferry, and then in Germany it connects right with a track over there. So an entire passenger train was on the ferry with us to Germany!
When we arrived in Hamburg, it definitely seemed different than Copenhagen. One of the first things we noticed, because it was dark and we couldn't see much, was the abundance of police sirens. Not particularly unusual for a large city, but not something you hear in Copenhagen all that often. That made me thankful for how safe of a city I chose to study abroad in. I'm definitely lucky here to be able to walk around at any hour without too much fear. We want to do too much the first night, as it was late and we had to be up quite early the next day, so we grabbed some pizza, for about half what we would have paid in Denmark, and went to sleep.
The next morning, we woke and visited the St. Nikolai memorial, which commemorates the firebombing of Hamburg by the allies during World War II. Over the course of one week, in Operation Gomorrah, approximately 50,000 German civilians, consisting mostly of the elderly, women, and children, were killed. The memorial itself consisted the remains of a destroyed church, with some really nice statues. It's difficult to describe, but by looking around you could definitely see some of the damage that was done during the firebombing. They have left some of the rubble around and the bricks of the belltower are still scorched. Statues in the memorial commemorate the bombings. And the remaining belltower was clearly once a part of a very beautiful building that is now gone. Beyond the memorial itself, none of the buildings look much older than fifty years, because none of the older buildings survived the war. It's strange to me that where I stood, a completely different city would have stood sixty years ago.
After visiting the memorial we had some time to ourselves to see downtown Hamburg, which was really beautiful. The city hall was absolutely gorgeous and the lake next in the city center provided a great view when we walked around it. Our exploration of the city center lead me to a few conclusions about Germany:

1. Germany has many more Starbucks than Denmark. Seriously, we found two Starbucks within in the same block!
2. Germany is cheaper than Denmark. But where isn't?
3. They speak less English in Germany than in Denmark. It was a little strange to encounter a language barrier, since I have not had to deal with that at all in Denmark. I guess I've gotten spoiled, because I really shouldn't expect to be able to speak English everywhere in Europe.
4. Hamburg has a great city center and it convinced me that I really want to go back and spend more time in Germany.

The rest of the day was spent visiting Neuengamme, a local concentration camp, which was the real purpose of the trip to Hamburg. I will say that it was not what I expected from a former concentration camp, but I definitely learned a lot and I am very glad that I did it. Before visiting the main camp, we visited a sub-camp of Neuengamme called Bullenhuser Damm. Bullenhuser Damm was a school that was shut down and used as a sub-camp durign the war. It is particularly famous for the brutal killing of 20 Jewish children in the boiler room. A part of the building is a memorial for the killings. But the really strange thing is that most of the building is used for businesses, and of all things, a kindergarden. My professor who was with us made an interesting point, that if every single site in Germany where an unjust killing during World War II took place was completely shut down, then there would be nowhere left for Germans to work and live. And I know I'm coming at this from a different cultural perspective than Germans, but I really don't see that Bullenhuser Damm is a great place for a kindergarden. I just can't wrap my head around it.
Finally, we visited the main concentration camp. It didn't look like what I expected. The barracks were burned down at the end of the war, and in their place were rectangles filled with stones. Plus, there was tons of grass and it was one of the most beautiful, sunny days, which somehow just didn't mesh with my expectation of a concetration camp. I expected that the day would feel a lot more dreary, but of course that is not realistic. Even so, the camp was still very interesting and very sad at the same time. There was an enlightening museum, factories, and remains of many of the buildings from the camp. I'm not going to go into any more detail than that, because I am not a good enough writer to do it justice.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading!