The Significance of Berlin Wall

Good morning, afternoon or evening depending on what part of the world this blog may find you.  I am on a train towards Heidelberg, which is located south of Germany and it is 7:19am.  I plan on arriving Heidelberg in 6 hours.  I spent little over 2 days in Berlin and one day in Potsdam.  The stay was awesome and I learnt so much.

The Wall fell in 1989 reuniting the two halves of the city that had stayed separated for decades. What remains now are the last vestiges of the infamous fortification and memories of those who died attempting to cross it.

What can I tell you about Germany?  Well I am still in German ground and I plan to stay for two more days in Heidelberg and Baden Baden. I think the only thing I would ask the Germans to do is to smile a bit more.  I have traveled to Europe before and this trip counts as my fourth time stopping by Europe.  Germany is one of the only European countries that I struggled the most finding my way around.  Nothing was translated to English and everything was in German.  It is not a tourist friendly country, at least not Berlin.  I spend a whole day walking around Berlin with my friend Dalia, who is a practicing physician there and an Egyptian by origin.  After 6 hours of showing me around, I asked Dalia with a surprise tone, “I don’t see history."  She nodded and continued that the war has left this country nothing.  I did see pictures of how things should have been before the World War II.  I saw portraits of bombed churches, building, dead bodies, etc.  Then as we continued our walk, I ran into the Berlin wall, and there I read miscellaneous messages on the wall written by random people.  If you don’t know what wall I am referring to, well this is the wall that separated West Berlin from the East.  This is the wall that Germans had to go through checkpoints to get to the east from the west.  The wall is damaged now but there were a few blocks remained in the city.  Some of the messages I read on the wall were the following,

Love, live, laugh

Learn from this

I love Berlin

Be nice to your enemy because it pisses them off

An image of myself reading miscellaneous messages on what is remained from the
wall that separated Wester Berlin from the East. 

There were many messages written on the wall in different languages, which I did not understand.  Right at that moment, my memories took me all the way back to Boston where I was a first year doctoral student.  As I was walking around the campus one day in Northeastern, I ran into a group of Jewish students running some sort of an activity for a Jewish student organization.  They stopped me to ask me write a note and they promised that my note will be posted on the wall that separates the Jews from the Palestinians in Israel.  Just then I thought to myself, what would be the one thing I want  these students to know?  Yes, co-existence, I agreed.  “Having a wall separating you from the muslims is not the answer,” I had to tell the group. I handed my note with the world, “Co-Existence” and I asked my note to be posted on the wall.  Did they post my note on the wall?  I am yet to know. 

My loyal blog readers, war damages a nation.  It damages history, empires, and humanity.  What is even stronger than war is separatism and segregation.  It only kills me to see people discriminate and build walls amongst themselves due to simple differences in dialects, religious beliefs, cultural differences, etc.  I find this practice rather prevalent among our fellow Kurdish people in Kurdistan.  Muslims choose (please note that I am intentionally utilizing the word, choose, because it really is a choice that people are making) a wall to separate them from the yazidis, soranis build a wall to separate from the bahdinis, PUK from PDK, male from female, Arabs from Kurds, etc. What is even uglier is when we let these minor differences get in the way of our practice and interactions with students, patients, clients, etc. 

Lighting a candle in Cathedral of Cologne in Berlin
and praying for peace to the whole world and co-existance among the world citizens :)

Suspicion, intolerance, and mistrust about others are driving us apart. We are stronger when we share, and smarter when we listen and coexist.