This week made a really big impact on me in terms of how I looked at art history. I had always assumed, since I began my study of art history, that art was something that was hung in a museum, and that it was something that took incredible talent and time to produce. I had never thought about how art can be so different than what humans consider ‘fine art’.

Honestly, I thought that coming into this trip I would be way more into the American and British things than the German. After all, Nazi’s were the bad guys in World War II, so it only seems fair that I shouldn’t have any respect for them. What happened, in reality, was the exact opposite. For me, the most amazing thing that I saw during the Normandy trip was the German cemetery. This cemetery really drove home the point, for me at least, about memory and history being created as two separate things, and how art can reflect either. Here was a cemetery that I thought I was going to hate, and instead, I found myself cleaning off a lot of the graves that I found, trying to make the grave look nicer. I stopped myself in the middle of cleaning a grave and really thought about that moment, how I had changed my views completely. It really made me think about the memory/history argument we had been learning about in class, and how it really was summed up in that moment.

This week has been really eye-opening for me because it was one of the first times that I have been truly able to connect something that we have learned in class to something that I saw on the outside. I hope that I have more chances like this in our last week here.