We are Traveling by Train
Early in 2025, Germany held snap federal elections. The results showed an explosion of votes for the far-right party ‘Alternative für Deutschland’, AfD.
Its leaders refer to the Berlin Holocaust memorial as a ‘monument of shame’, use Nazi terms such as ‘Umvolkung’ to describe the effects of immigration on the German race, and make dehumanizing statements about migrants such as: “We can always shoot them later; that’s not the issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn’t matter to me.”
This party won the majority of the votes in the Eastern states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cold War divisions still run through the country.
The winter of 1945 was one of the coldest in European history. The entire Baltic Sea was frozen over. Millions of German families had to flee West in the advance of the Soviet Russian army. They fled the vengeance of an army that had witnessed its people brutally decimated by the German Wehrmacht.
The party leader of the AfD calls May 8th, 1945 “Day of defeat of one’s own country”. Her party trivializes Nazi crimes and performs a perfidious reversal of perpetrator and victim.
Shortly after the end of the war, the district offices of greater Berlin decided that sport was essential for the wellbeing of the population. They organized children’s games in the parks of the city. In Treptow a teacher leads children in the game called ‘We are travelling by train’
It was trains that brought some of them to Berlin from further East. It was also trains that brought Millions of Jews to the Nazi extermination camps as part of the ‘Final Solution’. Conditions on those trains were extremely inhumane. They were brought about by a dehumanizing view of entire ethnic groups. A view on the rise again today.