As part of our A Level psychology course we were lucky enough to travel to Berlin. Our group, of Year 12 and 13 students, spent four days touring the city visiting monuments, museums, and even visiting a concentration camp. On our first night we visited the Brandenburg gate, the Reichstag and unter-den-linden which is a train station specifically designed to take politicians to the Reichstag- wow it was grand and shiny! The next day we visited the Jewish museum, where we learnt about what life for Jewish people was like before and after the war. Within the museum there was an art installation called the Memory Void, where the room was made out of concrete and had a single skylight shining down on the metal clogs that cover the floor. When you look closer each clog symbolised a face looking like it was screaming in pain. In total there are 10,000 clogs dedicated to Jewish people, of all ages, who died during the holocaust.

As this was also an art trip, the next museum we visited was an art gallery called the Berlinische Galerie of Modern Art. We saw beautiful art work made by the likes of Piet Mondrian, Iwan Puni, Paul Klee and Moriz Melzer. This was a great opportunity for the art students to get some sketches for their coursework and for everyone else to enjoy the culture and beauty of Berlin.

Later on in the day we visited the gay museum. This museum celebrates the history of the LGBT community. During our tour we learnt about LGBT characters in video games and they way they were portrayed. The museum was full of colour and life and our tour guide talked proudly of the progress the community have made in the media. However, the hardship that they experienced cannot go unnoticed.

During the second day we visited Sachsenhausen, which was a concentration camp during the war. We were all taken aback by this experience and it is something we will never forget as we walked round the same place that the Jewish people and other undesirables were starved of their human rights.  

On the last day we visited the Stasi Prison Museum. This showed us what life was like after the war. We were shocked as our tour guide told us about the psychological torture that the prisoners who were taken here had endured. The prisoners had done nothing wrong except reject communist views, making them a target. They were tortured until they confessed to their crimes which allowed the Stasi officers to prosecute them in court.

Overall, this was a great opportunity for us to experience things related the holocaust previously learned about in our psychology studies as part of the social influence topic.