East Berlin: before and after the wall

The recent examination of the cold war era through the depiction of early 1960s Berlin in the 2015 film Bridge of Spies and the drama series Deutschland 83, reminded me of a visit I made to the city in 1986 and again in 2008. On both occasions I took a photograph from the same vantage point — the visitor’s platform of Berlin’s TV Tower near Alexanderplatz. I recently placed them side-by-side. This is the story of how I came to take them. Today it’s hard to imagine the absurdity of East and West Berlin. West Berlin was a small western enclave enclosed by the East German state, some 100 miles east of the West German border. Somehow after the Second World War the western allies, through the Berlin Airlift initiated because of a Soviet blockade, managed to preserve West Berlin’s existence as a symbol of western freedom in the heart of the Communist Bloc. In 1961 the German Democratic Republic (GDR) government, fearing a brain drain and loss of ideological credibility, built a concrete barrier encircling West Berlin dividing the city, scenes imagined in the film Bridge of Spies. In 1989 the wall came down, the communist bloc disintegrated and a process of East and West German reunification began. <a href="https://timfrantic.medium.com/east-berlin-before-and-after-the-wall-8bb946a189df">Visit Now</a>