2026 Berlin Study Tour: Reflection

This year, I was honored to receive the International Relations Study Tour Scholarship to attend the 2026 Study Tour in Berlin, Germany.

Before moving to Los Angeles, I lived in Berlin for seven years. While there, I received my undergraduate degree from Humboldt University of Berlin. As I prepare to graduate with my MLIS next spring, I'm interested in returning to Berlin to continue my professional career. 

The study tour offered a chance to reconnect with a city I know well through the lens of art librarianship. I was particularly excited to learn more about how my professional and educational background could transfer to Germany, as well as get a closer look at the day-to-day operations of art libraries there.

Berlin was founded in 1237. Everywhere you look reveals another layer of the city’s history. The galleries, libraries, archives, and museums we visited are tasked with stewarding and grappling with that history. Each institution we visited throughout the week was a piece in the puzzle of the city’s incredibly complex, traumatic, and resilient history. 

We began with Berlin's early history. At the Staatsbibliothek, historic city maps traced the city's development, while photographs by Marie Panckow at the Berlinische Galerie documented Berlin before the widespread bombing that occurred during World War II and transformed the city. 

The 20th Century was a famously tumultuous time in Berlin. Our trip to Bauhaus Dessau helped us contextualize Germany—and by extension, Berlin—in the interwar period. At the Deutsches Historisches Museum, we discussed their collection of Nazi-era books and materials and how to ethically document this period of history. We explored the Cold War period at the Stasi Record Archive, the Berlin Wall Memorial, and the Achim Freyer Kunsthaus, and the complexity of stewarding materials during a period of censorship and limited freedom of movement. 

Berlin is as much a center for contemporary art as it is a place of historical memory, so we visited contemporary artists at Kunsthaus Dahlem as well as Giuliana Prucca, an independent curator, researcher, and writer based in Berlin. We also learned about current practices of archiving contemporary artists at the Akademie der Künste.

I left Berlin with a deeper appreciation for the role that librarians, archivists, curators, and information professionals have played and continue to play in stewarding Berlin’s cultural memory throughout the ages. It is thanks to their work that we have an archive at all, albeit one with significant gaps. I'm excited to bring these perspectives back to my own work stewarding cultural memory in our current era of geopolitical and ecological tumult. 

Endless gratitude to ARLIS/NA and the International Relations Committee for making this trip possible. As a master's student, participation in the study tour would simply not have been financially feasible without this scholarship, and it made an invaluable professional experience possible.