Hamburg & Berlin briefly revisited

  
Hello subscribers!
  

As announced in the previous DT Newsletter, I went on a short trip to northern Germany over the Easter period, mainly to visit family and sort out some bureaucratic things that needed doing, but also managed to slot in the odd dark-tourism element in Hamburg and Berlin, as covered in this latest Blog post that I uploaded yesterday.
  

One element in it was a kind of pilgrimage, namely to a house directly adjacent to the primary school I attended as a child growing up in Hamburg (featured in the photo above – the walls to the right belong to the school). I was blissfully unaware of it then, but when I first visited Auschwitz in 2008 I spotted amongst the heap of victims’ suitcases on display one that had the address of that house in Hamburg on it, which brought the whole story personally somewhat closer to home, as it were.

Going back now I wondered whether the name on the suitcase at Auschwitz would also appear on a “Stolperstein” in front of the address Kielortallee 22. (For those who don’t know: “Stolpersteine”, literally ‘stumbling stones’, is the term for the little brass cobbles set into the pavement outside buildings’ entrances from which victims of the Holocaust and the Nazi regime were evicted during the Third Reich, with the name, date of birth and place of death inscribed on the surface.) I was somewhat surprised to find that the name on that suitcase was not represented here. And I wonder why not and whether anything can be done about changing this – I’ll look into it.
  

I also saw a few more directly DT-relevant places in Hamburg – as set out in the new Blog post – but I won’t go into details here. Likewise for Berlin – check the new Blog post. Just one more thing I’ll give away here: I went to prison in Berlin! … though not under arrest ;-) Read the new Blog post to get the full story …
  

But so much for recent travels. I am now looking at a long period of writing up chapters for my main website covering those recent finds in Germany as well as embarking on the giant task of writing up everything from the material gathered on my longer trip to Taiwan last December (as briefly summarized in this previous Blog post), and also some new and updated chapters for Krakow. And in between I will try and slot in the odd new Blog post and Newsletter too.
 

But for now:

best wishes,

Peter