Author: Eustory-Blog

Looking out of the window this morning didn’t make us happy: it was raining cats and dogs, exactly on the day we were planning to make our first interviews in Berlin. Despite that we finished our questionnaires and were ready to go right after lunch. The interviews took place in different parts of the city, so that each group traveled on its own. While sitting in the train, people made last adjustments to their topic sheets and got more and more excited. The interviewee for the Romanian group was Miss Carmen-Francesca Banciu, author and creative writing coach, who has been living in Berlin for almost 20 years. She told us about her experiences as the daughter of a communist official in Romania’s 1980s. The group dealing with Spain under Franco’s regime met with Ignacio Sotelo, a journalist involved in politics, who left the country in the late 1950s and who still works as a correspondent for El Pais. The third group faced GDR history by talking with Frank Ebert who was member in a resistance organization against GDR regime. Mrs Blumensath was a young girl when Poland was under socialistic government and moved to Germany after her school graduation . For the young interviewers these migration experiences were very impressive. The interviews demanded our full attention, sometimes even up to three hours, but afterwards we were all satisfied with the information we had gathered. For our hard work we were rewarded with dinner in a cosy restaurant in the city centre. Tired as always, all we wanted to do was to go home directly and have a good night’s sleep. With sleepy eyes we got on the wrong bus in Wannsee and almost had to walk through the rain back home. But, before midnight almost everyone was sleeping peacefully in his/her bed.

Saturday was reserved for introducing the participants to the topic of the academy. With the help of a “time machine” the students travelled to the Soviet Union, 1970s Poland, Nazi Germany and communist Romania. Each of the four groups shared their experience by performing a sketch about their destinations in the past. In the next two days they will have the opportunity to speak with people from the past that experienced totalitarian regimes in Poland, GDR, Spain and Romania. To prepare these interviews they had a workshop in the afternoon, where they learned more about oral history and how to ask the right questions when talking to an eye witness. After dinner, the groups gathered again with the purpose of thinking and formulating the questions they would wish to ask in their interviews. These won’t be the only interviews we will have at this academy. Every evening, four of us will take the voice recorder and will share with each other impressions on the day that has ended. Our first four volunteers (Sofie, Ana-Maria, Antti and Jasmin) felt both excited and exhausted after this long day and were looking forward to meeting the eye witnesses in Berlin.