At 3:30am Friday, 1st May, a rather sleepy coachful of students and teachers departed The Marlborough School set for Heathrow. Thirty five GCSE History and German students, joined by Mr Moss, Miss Soame, Miss Cox, and Miss Sheridan, set off for our annual Berlin trip.

After touching down in Berlin, we headed first to drop our things at the hostel before travelling by train to the nearby town of Oranienburg, the site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Students explored and reflected on the site, before heading back into the heart of Berlin. Here, we tried currywurst at the famous Curry 36 before heading back to our hostel for a rest.

Day 2 in Berlin was all about the museums. We started at the DDR museum, an interactive look at daily life for East Germans under Communist rule. After a quick pit stop for an iconic German pretzel, we then headed for the East Side Gallery, a collection of murals on the longest surviving section of the Berlin Wall. Next, we set out for the Topography of Terror museum, which details the repression under the Nazis. Finally, we visited the Jewish Museum, the largest in Europe, to learn about the history of Jews in Germany from the Middle Ages to the present. At last, we went to the Berlin Mall, for a food court dinner and a bit of shopping.

Day 3 featured Mr Moss’ Great Walking Tour of Berlin. And what a walk it was! Clocking in at 16 miles on a 30°+ day, we saw a huge number of historical sites, memorials, and political buildings: the SDP headquarters, Potsdamer Platz, the Soviet War Memorial, the Tiergarten, Checkpoint Charlie, Moltkebrücke Bridge, the Brandenburg Gate, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Reichstag… Hot, footsore, and hungry, we ended the day at a Biergarten, where the hot pretzels and self-service cold sodas revived us. At last, we headed back to the hostel for our last sleep of the trip.

Day 4 began with a walk to Tempelhof Airport, a gigantic Nazi-era airport that has now been repurposed as a public park. We visited the exhibition and then walked around the premises. Finally, we headed back to the hostel, grabbed our bags, and boarded the train for Berlin Airport, arriving back in Woodstock sleepy but full of the buzz of the trip. The Berlin trip is a fantastic opportunity for our GCSE historians to develop their knowledge of the Weimar and Nazi Germany and Superpower Relations courses, and for our GCSE Linguists to practice their German in the real world.

Ms Sheridan (History & English Teacher)