WALL
Photographs © Brian Rose
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The
Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 1985
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At
the Brandenburg Gate I took a series of photographs of tourists posing
before this symbol of Berlin. It could be a tourist sight in any city.
Many sightseers are transported around on large windowed buses with
guides pointing and speaking into a microphone. At Potsdamer Platz
they all get out, take pictures, buy souvenirs, and get back on the
bus.
Many Berliners use the path alongside The Wall to get from place
to place—often on bicycles—to avoid the streets. The Wall,
while standing within East German territory, is easily walked up to,
and graffiti—from the trite to the wonderful—is found
everywhere, but most abundantly in Kreuzberg, a scruffy neighborhood
of artists and immigrants. |
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Niederkirchnerstrasse,
Berlin, 1985
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Berlin
exerts a pull on me, as I’m sure it does on many people. It
is a hard thing to articulate. The city is not in any normal sense
attractive, but it has presence visually. The remaining pre-war
buildings—often battered and scarred--the vacant lots, the
blocks of new apartments and office buildings, all can be read visually
as history and urban archaeology. You can’t forget the war
and subsequent events here.
There used to be several great train
terminals around Berlin Mitte, and though the buildings were mostly
destroyed (bombed or later torn down), the S-Bahn trains often follow
the old tracks through the locations of the abandoned stations—and
on the S-Bahn one can almost imagine Berlin before the war. |
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Waldemastrasse,
Berlin, 1985
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Bernauer
Strasse , Berlin, 1985
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I
walked on further to a cul-de-sac formed by a turn in the wall.
Here was a large steel tower on the west side for viewing. A tourist
bus pulled up and disgorged itself. A group of white crosses under
a low but very full tree stood next to the viewing platform. I climbed
up, the binoculars swiveled my way, and below was a particularly
narrow corridor between the walls. From the tower one sees easily
the street life of East Berlin, the passersby looking ahead, or
occasionally glancing our way, and the street cars negotiating a
turn-around dictated by the wall, which interrupts the former through
traffic of Bernauer Strasse. |
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Bernauer Strasse, Berlin, 1985
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Bernauer
Strasse , Berlin, 1985
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Am
Zandkrug , Berlin, 1985
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Stubenrauchstrasse,
Berlin, 1987
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Bernauer
Strasse , Berlin, 1985
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Niederkirchnerstrasse, Berlin, 1987
Former Luftwaffe heaquarters (background)
SS/Gestapo foundations (foreground)
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Potsdamer
Platz, Berlin, 1987
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Checkpoint
Charlie, Berlin, 1987
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On
Monday I took a break from walking The Wall and crossed over to
East Berlin with my friend Anamarie. Indulging a passion for early
modernist architecture we went looking for a couple of late 20s
buildings listed in our architectural guide book The area of the
city we went to is called Lichtenberg. It’s a gritty and depressing
place. One building we went to see was partially burnt out and partially
used, but no one seemed to be around.
We then went looking for another
project, but were stymied by a huge compound of buildings with guards
and video cameras in the area where the housing project was supposed
to be. I was unnerved by the situation and told Anamarie I wanted
to get out of there. Guards in the distance started pointing at
us, and we quickly retreated down the stairs of an U-Bahn station
and stepped onto an arriving train. We later found out that the
compound was the headquarters of the GDR secret police—the
Stasi—or Staatssicherheitsdienst. The CIA, FBI and secret
service rolled into one. Not a place to be walking around, particularly
carrying a camera. |
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Lübars, Berlin, 1985
The wall runs along the horizon.
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Checkpoint
Charlie ,
Berlin, 1987 .
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