Christopher Street Day 2025 - Berlin Pride Celebration - Fighting Hatred






On my way from Schoeneberg, I stopped at Wittenbergplatz (which always reminds me of Itzik Wittenberg, the FPO leader in the Vilna ghetto, though the place is called after a general/battle in the Napoleonic wars) to eat something. From there, I walked to my hotel, along with the Christopher Street Day parade, also known as the Berlin Pride Celebration, as it passed right by my hotel (which, as I wrote yesterday, happens to be near the Nollendorfplatz). The parade is a very colorful, friendly and quite loud event, with between 500,000 and a million people attending every year. The atmosphere seemed to be very happy and inclusive. This was 'my' first pride event ever. Mainly because I (almost physically) hate crowds and noise. But I really enjoyed watching all these shiny happy people. It was good to see so many happy people feeling safe, celebrating and supporting gay pride in the German capital today. If I learnt anything from the many museums and memorials that I have visited in the last two weeks, it is that we should not take this for granted, on the contrary, we must everything we can to protect it. Fighting for democracy means fighting against every form of hatred.LHTBQ+fobia, islamofobia, anti-Semitism, and so on and so on. 

The following poster I saw at the entrance to the Memorial for the Zuchthaus/KZ Brandenburg: "Hatred is not an opinion." You could put that on a t-shirt, together with a slogan that I saw a woman at the parade wearing: "Love is not a choice."


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A little bit about myself

Image
My name is Yonathan Bar-On (Bert de Bruin). Born and raised in the Netherlands, I have lived in Israel since 1992. I am a historian and a columnist for the Dutch daily Friesch Dagblad, and I have been teaching English at the high school of the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa, Israel for the last 15 years. In my classes, besides the English high school curriculum, I usually have time to do extracurricular projects. I have developed class projects (often using material provided by Centropa ) on topics like human rights, refugees, Holocaust, migration, and resistance in Nazi-Germany. You can get an impression of those and other projects by clicking here . I've participated in Centropa seminars in Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Sarajevo, and Prague. With two different Ukrainian schools, in 2024 and 2025 I did a project titled 'Comfort Food in Times of War', in which our students shared experiences from the wars in their country and made videos about dishes that helped them cope ...
Read more

The Man in the Clouds - A trilingual book for interreligious and intercultural dialogue and education

Image
This project will be the main focus during my stay in Berlin. It started in 2016 as an idea for a workshop in Stuttgart for Palestinian and Israeli teachers: to have Israeli, Palestinian and German students translate a Dutch children's book into Arabic, Hebrew and German, get a trilingual, fully illustrated edition of the book published, and use that book in Israeli, Palestinian and German elementary schools. The book was written by Koos Meinderts and Annette Fienieg, whose permission to use the text and illustrations I asked and received before I started working on the project. The book is  The Man in the Clouds (De man in de wolken) , and it deals with the importance of giving, sharing, accepting the other, and the dangers of greed and materialism. Its main themes are universal, which together with the beautiful illustrations makes the book a great tool for intercultural and interreligious dialogue and education. I teach English at the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa, and fou...
Read more

One project finished - A Practical Guide to Memorials of Persecution and Resistance in and around Berlin

Image
 The first (though secondary) of the two projects that I worked on during my time in Berlin has been finished successfully. It is a practical guide for anybody who is in Berlin and wants to visit one or more of the 69 memorials and museums that appear in the guide. It includes a useful guide with a basic description, links to a website (for most sites) and the location in Google maps, plus information about opening hours etc. where relevant. The guide is called 'To Warn and Remember' and you can find it here . My cooperative project with House of One is in an advanced stage. I'm waiting for feedback and input from my Berlin colleagues, as soon as I have that (before the end of the month, I assume) I will finish, publish, and share the learning units based on 'The Man in the Clouds' .
Read more