March 26
Death Camp for Cutie Hookers - Rammstein's Greatest Hits!

I am in Berlin with my DIS study tour group. Jeff, Christina, and Rachel are here with me, along with a man who looks surprisingly like a slightly fatter Harold Ramis. Only slightly.
Before reaching Berlin last night, our bus stopped at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp where DIS had arranged for us a tour of the grounds. I was a little anxious and very hungry for my first visit to a Holocaust site, and my hunger only made me feel worse about the situation. There I was in the Sachsenhausen parking lot, complaining about the fact that I had missed breakfast… pathetic.

Touring a former death camp is a powerful experience, and it is impossible to truly capture it with words alone. The words must be accompanied by maudlin song. So throw on the Garden State soundtrack and prepare to read…

THOUGHTS THAT OCURRED TO ME WHILE TOURING SACHSENHAUSEN

• “Did you get here by train?” is a good example of a bad question for the tour guide to ask.
• National Socialist sounds so much friendlier than Nazi.
• Whattya think having had SS officers live in these houses done to property values around here?
• People are taking pictures of “Arbeit Mech Fri” (Work Makes You Free) – the sign on the prison gates that was installed to mock the prisoners as they entered. I’m sure that will make a helluva background on someone’s desktop. Maybe I should snag a photo of the old Nazi barracks for my ex’s picture caller-ID.
• If not for Hitler and the Holocaust, there would be so much less humor in the world today. No Mel Brooks, that's for sure.
• I wonder how the gay kids are handling this. Do homosexuals identify with the historical suffering of other homosexuals the way Jews do? Now there’s a question for the rabbi.
• Holocaust victims were targeted for being Jewish. It didn’t matter what kind of person they were, how loving of a husband or wife or son or daughter they were, how many free throws they could make in a row, or how often they took in beggars off the street and fed them a hot meal. It was narrow-minded discrimination based purely on religious affiliations. Ironically, Jewish mothers today support a similarly ignorant method of discrimination - the Must Marry A Jew policy. It doesn’t matter how incredibly amazing of a person your girlfriend could be… She’s a Dartmouth grad working on the hill! She’s an inner-city schoolteacher with a passion for recycling! She’s a Gulf War veteran turned veterinarian! Not Jewish? Then you can send that relationship straight to the chambers.

My first night in Berlin was spent ogling/bothering the city’s exceptionally skanky prostitutes (good skanky). We had asked our study tour guide to point us in the direction of “where the young people party,” and we had started to walk down Oranienburg strasse when I saw the most beautiful girl in the world standing along the street among a row of parked cars, wearing a fanny pack. Huh. A little further up the street I saw another extremely beautiful woman, and then another one on the other side of the street, and both of them were wearing fanny packs! I kept walking, and sure enough, I kept running into gorgeous girls just standing around, wearing fanny packs. Who were these women? Lost tourists? Stylish meter maids? WHORES! They’re all whores! And that’s when I remembered some of my favorite porn stars are German! I hatched a brilliant plan to come back the next night dressed in a suit with a handful of business cards that say "Scott Rogowsky - Dream Weaver," and I'll march right up to these girls and say, "What are you doing on the street, Dollface? You oughta be in pictures! Come back with me to Hollywood and I'll make you a star!" Then I'll hand them my business card, drop a smoke bomb, quickly cop a feel, and vanish into thin air! OH, IT IS BRILLIANT!