Iโve walked through Berlin before. Itโs a city of steel and scarsโmodern glass towers reflecting streets that still remember the weight of tanks. You can feel it when you step off the train: the silence between the words, the way the air seems to carry a burden no one talks about out loud.
Germanyโฆ theyโve lost so many of their people. Two wars, two broken empires, entire generations ground up in the gears of ideology and conquest. A collective trauma like that doesnโt vanish. It lingers in the bones of the survivors, and it shapes their children and their childrenโs children. You see it in their eyesโa mix of pride, shame, and fatigue.
And I canโt shake the thoughtโฆ somewhere in Moscow, Lenin and Stalin are still lying in their glass coffins, mummified monuments to a system that promised utopia and delivered graves. Theyโre waiting. Waiting for their show trial. Not the kind staged for propaganda, but the kind history gives, slow and merciless.
The trial isnโt in a courtroom. Itโs in the ruins left behind. Itโs in the empty villages where fathers never came home. Itโs in the whispers of families who never found the bodies of their sons. Itโs in Germany, Russia, Ukraineโall the lands that bore the cost of their visions.
When I think about it, I wonder if nations carry wounds the same way soldiers do. Trauma buried deep, never healed, only scarred over. And scarsโฆ they ache when the weather changes.
Germany still aches. The ghosts of their dead march alongside them. And until the world can put Lenin and Stalin on the standโnot just their names, but the entire legacy of death and deceptionโtheyโll keep haunting us all.
Because history doesnโt bury its monsters. It preserves them.
