Berlin Wall

This is a photo from 1958 / 1959. The "Hügelgrab" (tumulus) as the Berliner called little rest, became quite a tourist attraction.



Before the house were built, 1969.


(Both photos taken from West Berlin.)

If I still had mine from the 1966 or 1967 ... (The 1967's are those I really miss: I've taken a couple of films of demonstrations etc just hours (and days after Benno Ohnesorg was shot. Lost them somehow somewhere.)

Hey, I like rainy pictures.
I'm listening in here.

If you click the picture it becomes larger...

We went to a restaurant there called "Staendige Vertretung" ( steady representation). It was full of east/ west history, newspaper clippings, pictures of politicians east and west. It's not an ordinary pub/restaurant, more a chronicle of the political stories that happened around the time when Berlin had no embassies, only steady representation - thus the name of the pub "Staendige Vertretung". We had a blast there....

I'd like that place.

Yeah osso, you'd love it there. Here are some pictures in the rain...

Checkpoint Charly.....it rained heavily then....

A last one...not sure where I have my other pictures.

Checkpoint Charlie is now a big disappointment - with new paint and the venue around it is too modern. It just doesn't feel the same.

Walter and CJ, No, I was there after the Berlin wall was taken down (wasn't tjat in 1989?), and I did a tour of Germany and Poland. Even then, most of the buildings were heavily damaged, and they were in the process of reconstruction. I remember they hung huge paintings in front of the reconstruction site on how it would look after they've completed their work.

I saw the tv tower from my hotel room window in East Berlin, and that was built in 1969.

The pub got that name because of the "Ständige Vertretung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in der DDR" (= Permanent Representative of the Federal Republic Germany in the GDR") = a kind of embassy.

The pub is co.owned by a private Cologne brewery ... and a small pub chain by now: in several German cities you find these "Rhineland embassies".

Those photos with the balloons are chilling in a good way..

I like these rain shots.. especially the last with the verklempt building (I take it).

I like the pictures taken in the rain. It gives so much more of a atmosphee than those taken on a bright sunny day.

Not too much rain; Germany has suffered from floods too often!

Three years ago, we had been ... three times in Berlin (but actually stayed in Potsdam, next to the former Soviet officer's mess and cinema).

The following, it was just one visit, together with our English friends ... a few days after the The Wall opened:

"The Asisi Panorama - The Wall on a divided Berlin by the artist Yadegar Asisi at Checkpoint Charlie at the corner of Friedrichstraße and Zimmerstraße consists of a cylindrical steel rotunda that displays a panorama of the daily routine on both sides of the Berlin Wall on an autumn day in the 1980s.

Asisi, who actually lived in Kreuzberg in the 1980s, has bundled his memories in the panorama and goes into great detail in his narration of stories, which would not have happened that way at the same time."

I must admit that the scenes as painted there, were not only similar but gave (me) exactly the same feeling I had had when I'd bee in Berlin in the late 1960's and the 1980's.

I've taken some photos there, but due to the many visitors and the difficult light (night/day was continuously simulated), it wasn't easy.

But you might get an idea - especially, when you've looked at the website linked above.