Alex is abroad in Munich, Germany, until August 2009.

In February 1943, members of the non-violent resistance group Die Weiße Rose, or the White Rose, in Germany dropped hundreds of protest flyers in the main building of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. The Gestapo was called immediately, the group was taken into custody, and was executed within a week.

That main university building, where I have many of my classes, is now a memorial to the White Rose group on the first floor. That was an extremely abridged version of their story, but it comes to mind every time I walk into that building. The government has placed stone copies of their leaflets all over the plaza that look just like the originals when they were strewn all around the building. Mixed in with the flyers are small biographies of White Rose members, in a tribute to their resistance.

I don’t know if it is the history, the German university students, or a combination of both, but the atmosphere in the classrooms is completely different than that of classrooms in the US. Students have a much more casual attitude towards professors: although professors give students all the information that they could want to get out of the class, the students are never afraid to question the teaching method. Before class begins, students often make announcements about upcoming events or club meetings and are usually greeted with more enthusiasm than the professor. In one particularly overcrowded classroom, a petition against occupying a small classroom for such a popular class was circulating within three minutes of the start of class.

Usually I get a big kick out of these protests because it makes me feel like a part of the German student community when I can laugh or commiserate with the students. One protest however, I just can’t take seriously: tuition. The German universities have recently started charging 500 euros per semester for schooling, which, compared to the total lack of tuition that previously existed, may seem like a lot. But coming from our delightfully overpriced university, I have a hard time taking their complaints seriously, especially when a fair amount of them still receive scholarships. Whenever the tuition issue comes up in a conversation with a German student and I inform them that my university costs roughly $50,000 per year, I receive a wide range of jaw-dropping responses: “Seriously?” “I could buy like a Ferrari instead of going to college for that.” “How do you pay for that?” “No way.”

Though I find it hard to relate to the tuition protest, I do enjoy seeing students exercising their right to speak out. On my way down the stairs and through the main foyer, I eyed some protest postcards that were strewn all over the floor of the building. I was so enthralled with how many they were able to “distribute” that I hadn’t even notice I had walked outside, until the black postcards gave way to the stone leaflets of the White Rose as I made my way to the U-Bahn.

It’s an incredible juxtaposition to be walking through a place with such history and see that same spirit living on today.

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