Stubenrauchstrasse, Berlin/Potsdam, 1987

I recently received a nice email from someone who now lives in this street in Potsdam on the edge of Berlin. She’s part of a group that wants to more accurately document the path of the Berlin wall that used to snake through her neighborhood. You can see the border fencing reappearing in the street in the background. The fortifications did not always follow the border precisely, and in fact, sometimes deviated to accommodate existing houses, public infrastructure, and waterways. West Berlin subway lines passed under East Berlin, and even through eastern stations that were closed off and guarded.

I kept a journal of my travels along the Iron Curtain and Berlin Wall, and the following excerpt pertains to the photograph above. It’s taken verbatim from my hand written notebook. “Anamarie” is my dear American friend, and occasional collaborator, still living in Berlin.

Thursday, 26 February, 1987

Today, Anamarie and I went back to Steinstücken in hopes of more favorable sunlight at the S-Bahn crossing into the DDR. The light was still not good, so we went to a nearby community called Kohlhasenbrück where the S-Bahn and other trains leave West Berlin through a corridor formed by walls. On one street the houses back up to the wall—large upper middle class houses from before the war. One, from the 20s or 30s was designed in a radically modern fashion. Across the street from these fine houses was a camping ground full of trailers, empty for the winter. Next to the wall was a platform that provided a bizarre view of similar handsome houses over the border. Obviously, this was all over the neighborhood. The inner and outer barriers are very close together here and one can watch the DDR citizens going about their business. It’s disturbing, voyeuristic and every word for strange that can be thought up. The DDR people did not look at us though we were obviously illuminated by bright sunlight. This community, I believe, was originally as a whole a suburb of Potsdam, which is just outside of Berlin. Now, half is on the West Berlin side, and other half, divided the wall, belongs exclusively to Potsdam and East Germany.

The Lost Border, The Landscape of the Iron Curtain is available on Amazon, but signed copies are available only from my website here.