Berlin, just after the wall 1990
Posted by david purdie on
Our eldest son, Dominic has just returned from a month in Berlin and is due to head back ASAP for more. It seems its pull as a centre of youth culture and especially electronic music abides. Looking through his pictures got me searching out some of my remaining scans of old black and white photos from there. All shot on film and recently scanned.
As fresh faced youngsters, Andrea and I went to visit the city on the first anniversary of the wall coming down. This was 1990. We had expected some kind of event to mark the occasion, but maybe the hard effort of one country absorbing another and all the early challenges of that, were enough to be getting on with without the citizens of Berlin mucking about with parades and the like. It was an issue that required tact and sensitivity, with one side wanting to avoid triumphalism and the other pleased but perhaps somewhat humiliated.
As it was it was fascinating to see the somewhat intact eastern zone of the city in the very earliest stages of reunification. These pics are nearly all in what was the East, starting just on the western side, at the Brandenburg Gate, and the then unused Reichstag building. Looking at Dom's pictures the thing that jogged my memory (perhaps oddly) was all the pavements still looked identical to how they were in my pictures. Many of the buildings are restored though much of the fabric of the place is similar, but it's now a very different place at the same time. So it is strange to see something of the before here....
