DCU History Students visit Berlin
During Reading Week in February 2026, a group of history students and lecturers travelled to Berlin for a historical field trip. We visited a range of sites concerned with the city’s twentieth-century history. Highlights included the Topography of Terror museum, on a site that once housed some of the central institutions of the Nazi state, the Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen, a former central Stasi remand prison, and the DDR Museum, examining daily life in ‘East Germany’. The Topography of Terror museum tells the story of the rise of National Socialism and its campaign of persecution while the Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen tour provided an overview of the rise of a new surveillance state in the German Democratic Republic after the war. The DDR museum contains a replica state-provided apartment as well as a huge range of objects from contraceptive pills to vehicles. Overall, the sites highlighted the relationship between violence and day-to-day life in the two
German dictatorships.
The trip was organised and planned by Neville Scarlett and led by Roman Birke and Juliana Adelman.
Myia Forkin, second-year student in the Bachelor of Religious Education and History explains what she got out of the trip:
‘As a future history teacher with a keen interest in social history, these exhibitions brough a striking reality and awareness of how recent these events were giving an interesting perspective on how what we read in textbooks and study in class can get contextually enhanced by interacting with primary sources and first hand accounts of these time periods. The struggle to place historical events and periods correctly can often lead to modern history seeming far further in the past than is the reality, and is something I both experience myself and recognise amongst students in the history classroom. Getting the opportunity to extend my understanding of this time period outside of the classroom learning environment is one that I greatly value, and has given me a lot to reflect on both in my personal understanding of history and in how effective learning of history may be approached within my teaching practice.’
We’re already thinking about possibilities for next year!
Locations visited:
Walking tour starting at Brandenburger Tor
Checkpoint Charlie Museum (https://www.mauermuseum.de/en/start/)
Topography of Terror Museum (https://www.topographie.de/en/)
The Asisi Panorama of the Berlin Wall (https://www.asisi.de/en/panorama/the-wall)
Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen (Stasi prison museum, https://www.stiftung-hsh.de/en/)
DDR Museum (https://www.ddr-museum.de/en)
Holocaust Memorials for the disabled, homosexuals and Jews (https://www.stiftung-
denkmal.de/en/)
Reichstag dome (https://www.bundestag.de/en/visittheBundestag/dome/registration-245686)
