The Berlin Wall

 

I usually walk past the Berlin Wall whenever I'm in Berlin for a business trip. The Zalando campus is just close to the wall, and in fact, my department's building is just beside the Uber Arena.

(The Zalando campus in Berlin consists of 5 buildings AFAIK, of which some of the buildings are structured to represent letters, eg BHQ-X, the Zalando Headquarters, is shaped like an X. The building architectures are really designed to boast the city's artistic spirit. But this is beside the point.)

Going back to the topic... When I walked past the walls just last week, a lot of tourists were taking pictures of the wall, scrutinizing the art walls, and just do tourist things people do when they go to a famous landmark.

But I wonder, when they look at the walls, what do they actually see? Do they see the art? Or do they see what these walls used to symbolize?

I first visited the Berlin Wall last July 2016 when Mama Merlyn (Manong's mom) came to visit us. There were not much buildings around then, so you could actually feel the strength of the Berlin Wall. Yes, the paintings were there already but it made such a contrast to what the wall represented that it highlighted the cage that it symbolized.

Nowadays, I don't feel that anymore. Or maybe because I've walked along it quite often that I have taken for granted the meaning of the wall.

It was supposed to help people remember the wrongs of the past, and the confinement and oppression it brought to the society. Somehow, this wall has not stood to what it's supposed to remind us. We now see the rise of the same mentality that brought this wall up.

I sincerely hope that we see these symbols for what it was. The importance of why we need to keep our history and heritage preserved is so that our future generation will learn from our mistakes.

But then again, we humans, we prefer to make our own mistakes and learn from it, do we...?