A2 · Elementary
10 min
european historypolitical violencecivil rightsurban history
The City That Did Not Forget: Leipzig and the History of Violence
La Ciudad que No Olvidó: Leipzig y la Historia de la Violencia
This week, a driver rammed into a crowd in Leipzig, Germany, killing two people and injuring twenty-two. Fletcher and Octavio explore Leipzig's extraordinary history: a city of peaceful revolutions, Napoleonic battles, and now, once again, a scene of political violence.
Esta semana, un conductor embistió a una multitud en Leipzig, Alemania, matando a dos personas e hiriendo a veintidós. Fletcher y Octavio exploran la historia extraordinaria de Leipzig: ciudad de revoluciones pacíficas, batallas napoleónicas, y ahora, de nuevo, escena de violencia política.
6 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| manifestación | protest march; demonstration | Hay una manifestación en la plaza hoy. |
| manifestante | protester; demonstrator | Los manifestantes caminan por la calle. |
| violencia | violence | La violencia en la ciudad es un problema. |
| libertad | freedom; liberty | La gente quiere libertad. |
| historia | history; story | Leipzig tiene una historia muy importante. |
| pacífico | peaceful | La manifestación es pacífica. |
Leipzig keeps showing up in history at exactly the wrong moment.
Two people killed this week, twenty-two injured, a car driven deliberately into a crowd.
And my first thought, honestly, wasn't about the attack.
It was about the city.
Leipzig es una ciudad muy especial.
Leipzig is a very special city.
Tiene mucha historia.
It has a lot of history.
A lot of history is putting it mildly.
This is a city where, in 1813, roughly half a million soldiers fought in a single battle.
The biggest land battle in European history before the First World War.
Napoleon lost there.
His empire started unraveling right there on those streets.
Sí.
Yes.
La batalla es muy importante.
The battle is very important.
Se llama la Batalla de las Naciones.
It is called the Battle of the Nations.
Völkerschlacht.
The Battle of the Peoples.
Russians, Prussians, Austrians, Swedes, all fighting together against Napoleon's forces.
Three days of combat in October 1813.
Around ninety thousand people died.
There's a monument to it in Leipzig that took eighteen years to build and looks like something from a fever dream.
El monumento es muy grande.
The monument is very big.
Es muy famoso en Alemania.
It is very famous in Germany.
But that's only the beginning.
Jump forward about a hundred and seventy-five years and Leipzig is, of all things, the city where the East German regime started to crack.
Not because of military force.
Because people walked.
Sí.
Yes.
En 1989, la gente camina por las calles.
In 1989, people walk through the streets.
Quieren libertad.
They want freedom.
The Monday Demonstrations.
Montagsdemonstrationen.
Every week, people gathered at the Nikolaikirche, the Church of St.
Nicholas, and walked peacefully through the city.
It started with hundreds.
Then thousands.
Then on October 9th, 1989, seventy thousand people.
The regime had soldiers ready.
They didn't fire.
And that decision, right there, is probably the moment the wall came down.
Es una historia increíble.
It is an incredible story.
La gente no usa armas.
The people do not use weapons.
Usa sus pies.
They use their feet.
They use their feet.
That's exactly it.
And the city remembers this.
Leipzig built an entire identity around that moment.
The peaceful city.
The city of Wir sind das Volk.
We are the people.
And then this week, a car into a crowd.
Two dead.
Twenty-two hurt.
Es muy triste.
It is very sad.
Leipzig no quiere este tipo de violencia.
Leipzig does not want this type of violence.
No city wants it.
But I keep thinking about the geography of this.
Leipzig is in Saxony.
And Saxony in particular has had a rough decade when it comes to the politics of fear and anger.
Dresden, just an hour away, is where Pegida started.
Pegida es un grupo político.
Pegida is a political group.
No le gustan los inmigrantes.
They do not like immigrants.
Right.
Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West.
Started in Dresden in 2014, drew massive crowds, spread across Germany.
And Leipzig has had its own version of this tension for years.
The AfD, the far-right party, does extremely well in Saxony.
Better than almost anywhere else in Germany.
Muchos alemanes del este están enojados.
Many eastern Germans are angry.
La vida es difícil para ellos.
Life is difficult for them.
That's the thing that outsiders miss.
This isn't simply ideology floating in the air.
There's a very specific economic history underneath it.
After reunification in 1990, the eastern German economy basically collapsed.
Factories closed.
Unemployment hit forty percent in some places.
Young people left.
The population of Leipzig itself fell by a hundred thousand people in the nineties.
Es un problema grande.
It is a big problem.
La gente no tiene trabajo.
People have no work.
Está triste.
They are sad.
And when people feel abandoned by the system, they look for explanations.
Sometimes those explanations are reasonable.
Sometimes they're not.
Germany has been grappling with this for thirty-five years now and it still doesn't have a clean answer.
Alemania recuerda la historia.
Germany remembers history.
Por eso la violencia es muy difícil allí.
That is why violence is very difficult there.
That's a point worth sitting with.
Germany has built its entire postwar identity around the idea that it remembers.
The Holocaust memorials, the school curriculum, the laws against Holocaust denial.
The weight of memory is written into the architecture of the state.
And so when violence happens in a German city, it lands differently.
The country asks itself what it failed to see.
En Alemania, la historia es muy seria.
In Germany, history is very serious.
La gente no la olvida.
People do not forget it.
Vehicle ramming attacks are worth addressing directly, because they have become their own grim pattern.
Nice, 2016.
Berlin, 2016.
The London Bridge attacks.
Stockholm, Barcelona.
What changed is that they require almost nothing in terms of planning or resources.
A truck, a car, a crowd.
The terrorist's logic is brutal in its simplicity.
Es muy peligroso.
It is very dangerous.
Los coches están en todas partes.
Cars are everywhere.
Everywhere.
And cities have had to respond by redesigning public space in ways that would have seemed absurd twenty years ago.
Concrete bollards around Christmas markets.
Barriers on pedestrian bridges.
You walk through a European city center now and the security infrastructure is just part of the furniture.
You stop noticing it and then suddenly you notice it.
Las ciudades cambian.
Cities change.
La seguridad es muy importante ahora.
Security is very important now.
I was in Berlin in 2017, a few months after the Christmas market attack.
The Breitscheidplatz attack.
I went back to the square where it happened.
There was a memorial, flowers, a crack in the ground left deliberately unrepaired as a wound the city chose to keep visible.
That detail stayed with me for years.
Alemania no borra el dolor.
Germany does not erase the pain.
Lo muestra.
It shows it.
Es importante.
It is important.
That's a very German approach to memory.
And it connects back to Leipzig.
Because the reason we know the Monday Demonstrations of 1989 so well is that Germans documented them obsessively.
The photographs, the diaries, the oral histories.
Leipzig built a museum about it.
There's a whole institution dedicated to making sure that moment is never just a footnote.
El museo se llama Forum 1989.
The museum is called Forum 1989.
Es un lugar muy especial.
It is a very special place.
And I think there's something worth examining there, about what cities choose to remember and how they choose to remember it.
Leipzig's identity is tied to peaceful protest as a form of civic courage.
That's a very specific and fragile thing to carry.
La ciudad tiene dos historias.
The city has two stories.
Una es de paz.
One is of peace.
Otra es de violencia.
The other is of violence.
Every city does, if you go back far enough.
But Leipzig's contrast is particularly sharp.
The same streets where seventy thousand people walked peacefully in 1989 and changed the course of a continent, now have concrete barriers outside the shopping centers.
History doesn't move in a straight line.
It folds back on itself.
Tienes razón.
You are right.
La historia es complicada.
History is complicated.
No es simple.
It is not simple.
The investigation into this week's attack is still ongoing.
We don't know the full picture of who did this or why.
And I want to be careful about that, because the instinct to fit every attack into a pre-existing political narrative before the facts are in is one of the worst habits in journalism.
I've done it.
I've seen it done badly.
Es verdad.
It is true.
Primero necesitamos los hechos.
First we need the facts.
Después hablamos.
Then we talk.
Exactly.
What we can say is that the city of Leipzig has lived through remarkable things.
A Napoleonic catastrophe.
Firebombing in 1943 and 1944.
Forty years of communist dictatorship.
A peaceful revolution that actually worked.
And now this.
Whatever this turns out to be.
Leipzig siempre sobrevive.
Leipzig always survives.
La gente es fuerte allí.
The people are strong there.
They are.
And I think that's worth holding onto when you read the headlines.
The headlines this week say violence.
The longer story says survival, and memory, and people walking together in the dark toward something they couldn't see yet but believed was there.
Sí.
Yes.
Y las palabras son importantes.
And words are important.
Como la palabra manifestación.
Like the word manifestación.
Wait, hold on.
Manifestación.
I know this one.
I want to say it means manifestation, like a sign of something.
But you used it earlier to mean protest march.
Those are two very different things in English.
Sí.
Yes.
En español, manifestación es una marcha.
In Spanish, manifestación is a march.
La gente camina por la calle.
People walk down the street.
So if I say, in English, there was a manifestation of public anger at the government, I mean a sign or expression of that anger.
But in Spanish, una manifestación is the actual event.
People marching.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y los manifestantes son las personas que caminan.
And the manifestantes are the people who walk.
Ellos protestan.
They are protesting.
So the seventy thousand people in Leipzig in 1989 were manifestantes.
And what they did was una manifestación.
And in a way, that word captures what made that night so powerful.
It wasn't a riot.
It wasn't a coup.
It was people making something visible that the government had tried to keep invisible.
Sí.
Yes.
Una manifestación puede cambiar el mundo.
A manifestación can change the world.
Y tú lo dices bien.
And you say it correctly.
I'll take that.
Don't tell anyone in Madrid I got something right on the first try.