Trav­el­ling through a city and liv­ing in a city can mean dif­fer­ent things. While trav­el­ling I’ve become more sens­it­ive to the mat­ters con­cern­ing the his­tory and the devel­op­ment of a coun­try. That said, it’s not easy to avoid these things in South East Asia and every­one touches on that ground at some point.

Sur­viv­ing both Laos and Viet­nam with only minor injur­ies and no trop­ical dis­eases (though dis­eases non­ethe­less), we’ve arrived in Phnom Penh, cap­ital of Cam­bodia. The story of its young past is intriguing yet hor­ri­fy­ing. After years and years of gen­o­cide under the Khmer Rouge regime, the Cam­bod­ian people are now regen­er­at­ing from the slaughter­ing, the wars and the exclu­sion from the rest of the world. Not as quickly as Viet­nam, mind you, as this state is far poorer than its neigh­bor. Still: Phnom Penh is a grow­ing and evolving place, and not much is left to remind you of the ter­rible situ­ations that once were. People work quite eagerly, new con­struc­tion sites are opened by the day and there is, at least to some degree, a new wealth and health spread­ing. Slow and steady.

All of the pos­it­ive­ness — the tour­ism, the grow­ing eco­nomy and the pos­it­ive atmo­sphere in the city — reminds me a lot of Ber­lin and the Ger­man side of the war story. Liv­ing in Ber­lin brings forth many great advant­ages: there is a spirit of free­dom and liberty that you can­not grasp in the rest of Europe, a life­style so enjoy­able and after the tra­gedies of the past 60 years, only a few scars and memor­ies left here and there. From drink­ing on the street to wear­ing whatever the fuck you want to wear without any­one even blink­ing, and that’s only two very small examples of all that is possible.

We paid our trib­utes to the Killing Fields in Phnom Penh as well as to the hor­rible prison called S-21 that is a museum today, and it felt a lot like vis­it­ing a Con­cen­tra­tion Camp (KZ) in Ger­many. Ima­gine what it was like, both Phnom Penh as well as Ber­lin, before the lib­er­a­tion, before people could rebuild their scattered and des­troyed lives: it was inhu­man and fright­en­ing. But with that said, maybe it is neces­sary to remind ourselves from time to time, that a place like Ber­lin — and hope­fully in the future, Phnom Penh — does not come without a price tag on it.

Liv­ing some­where often renders you obli­vi­ous to the obvi­ous. See­ing all of these things today reminded me why I loved Ber­lin so much, because it recovered grace­fully and became a role model for every other place in the world that has to battle inhu­man­ity and chaos. People have fought for this, and it’s what we should appre­ci­ate the most today. I’m not try­ing to make this sound like an epic tale, I love the hedon­ism and the ease at heart just as much as the next per­son. Just remem­ber the next time you wit­ness a demon­stra­tion or a rave or a parade on the Ber­lin streets: it would have not been pos­sible without the past.