Postcards From Berlin
Last weekend I went away for a weekend to Berlin. I’ve been there before, but was surprised at how many more vibrant, offbeat and deliciously unique surprises the city had in store for me. Below are a smattering of the photographs I took over the course of the two days, the most thought-provoking sojourn was definitely our walk out to the Bösebrücke on Bornholmer Straße. The bridge was a key border crossing and the night the Berlin wall fell (9th November 1989) thousands of Berlin’s residents from east and west crowded over the walkway.
Whenever I read about the Berlin wall and all it represented, I have to concentrate really hard on the fact that it is reality; fact. I have to constantly remind myself that it isn’t some deconstructive work of fiction; that free-thinking citizens lived very literally next door to what might be best described as a Police State. Something about this almost ludicrous juxtaposition sends me reeling every time I think about it.
When I was there we stayed in the former East Berlin which was being reconstructed, so there were cranes and building sites everywhere (this was 1995, just over five years after the wall came down), but you could still see bullet holes in some of the buildings from the Second World War. It seems so bizarre now that a country could be so arbitrarily divided because of the decisions made at the end of the war, and you wonder who was the worst megalomaniac, Hitler or Stalin.
It would be nice to go back and see what all the building sites turned into.