And so, I made the trip to Germany. On my own, abroad, for the first time in my life. It was an extraordinary, transformative experience, not only for all that I saw and learned, and all the people I met along the way, but also for rediscovering that fearless explorer within, who has been hiding for decades since I first heard the word scleroderma.
As I’ve written here in recent months, the past couple of years with this disease have been more complicated. Finding myself suddenly short of breath when physically or emotionally stressed led to a battery of diagnostic exams, and ultimately a diagnosis of Type 2 Pulmonary Hypertension. Thanks to my wonderful cardiologist, I found a calcium channel blocker that works for me and mitigates the worst of the symptoms. I’ve also learned some new breathing techniques that help to avoid the problem when I start feeling stressed.
With all that, as I began to feel better again and moved past the worst of the pandemic, I felt a great need to get out—get out of my head, get out of my routine, and get out of the country to travel once more. I needed to prove to myself that I could do this on my own. Working on a novel about Germany during the Weimar Era and rise of the Third Reich, I had to see what I’d only been able to read about, and I needed to focus. I have family roots in Germany, as well. My mother and her parents immigrated to the U.S. in 1936 to escape the Nazis. So the visit was multi-layered.
As is always the case with travel, not everything went as planned. On both ends of my trip, I had to make last minute changes in my transatlantic flight—pushing back my departure from Boston by two days to avoid a Nor’easter that was threatening to wreak havoc with snow and high winds, and leaving a day early at the end when my flight home from Munich was cancelled due to a planned airport strike. (Yes, they plan strikes there, so you can work around it.) There were also two instances when the S-Bahn (commuter rail) in Berlin was running late or disfunctional, and I had to figure out how to grab a taxi to get to a tour on time. But it all worked out. And, to my amazement, I just rolled with it and problem-solved along the way.
For the most part, however, the trip was a wonderful journey, beginning with my seat mate on the way over, who was from Munich and gave me excellent suggestions for my two-night layover there. From Munich I flew to Berlin, where I stayed five nights in the very funky Hotel-Pension Funk, the former home of a silent film star that is decorated in period Art Nouveau style. I immersed in history, art, design, and architecture, including a visit to the Museum der Dinge (Museum of Things), where I learned about design standards as the country shifted from handcrafts to industrial manufacturing, and an outstanding private tour of sites and stories about Weimer Berlin. I also had dinner one evening with good friends and spent a day touring with them, as well.
From Berlin I traveled by train to Dessau, just under two hours southwest of Berlin, to stay at the Bauhaus, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Bauhaus School was in existence from 1919-1933, first in Weimar, then in Dessau, and finally for a brief period in Berlin before it closed under Nazi pressure. Founded by architect Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus melded art and technology to rethink how people could live and work humanely and cooperatively in post WWI society. I stayed two nights in what had been student housing, and toured the building as well as the outstanding Bauhaus Museum in the city.
From Dessau, I took a high speed train back to Munich, where I stayed at a small, very comfortable modern hotel in the Altstadt (Old City). My time in Munich at the beginning and end of the trip focused on why and how the Nazis formed there and gained power under Hitler. In both Berlin and Munich, I also visited concentration camp memorials—Sachsenhausen outside of Berlin and Dachau outside of Munich. Both tours were powerful experiences, sobering, profoundly thought-provoking. There is much dark history in Germany, but also a deep public reckoning with the past.
In Berlin, on Shabbat, I went to a synagogue that was a short walk from my hotel. The Pestalozzi synagogue was burned on November 9, 1938, on what has been called Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, but is now referred to in Germany as the Reichspogrom—a more accurate description of the two nights when Nazis directed the destruction of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses in pogroms throughout the country. Pestalozzi was not totally destroyed (burning it risked a neighborhood that the Nazis wanted to save) and was restored and rededicated after the war in 1947. It is a beautiful building, and the service felt much like ours at home.
Later, I realized that I was the first member of my family to set foot in a Jewish house of worship in Berlin in a century. It was one of the most important moments of the trip. I am still processing all that I experienced, and will be for some time. I am glad to be home, but I was also sad to leave. Most of all, I’m grateful to my dear Al, our wonderful daughters, many friends, and my entire medical team, who fully supported me on this adventure, and for the fact that I was able to thrive on my own.
Here are just a few images from my travels.
Evelyn Herwitz blogs weekly about living fully with chronic disease, the inside of baseballs, turtles and frogs, J.S. Bach, the meaning of life and whatever else she happens to be thinking about at livingwithscleroderma.com. Please view Privacy Policy here.
