From memory: Sie verlassen jetzt West-Berlin
My photographs of the Berlin Wall, taken in 1989, are amongst the most regularly viewed in my Flickr photostream. Understandable in the lead up to the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall on 9 November this year.
Some of them are mine and a few are a fellow traveller’s, collected by me at the time of my visit (and later) in January 1989. Walking some of the perimeter of the Wall, looking at that stark sign, ‘Sie verlassen jetzt West-Berlin’, was sobering and I wanted to remember it from all angles.
I wrote about it in my travel diary. All year I’ve been meaning to go back and revisit those memories, which I was sure would be fresh, vivid, insightful – but that is not quite the case. I am as happy for my twenty year’s younger self to stay buried between those pages as Harry Potter would have been for the owner of Tom Riddle’s diary to do the same. My observations are indeed very much of the moment and seem, to me now, shallow – real, true, but shallow. Perhaps that was the value of committing them to paper – instant thoughts without the value of reflection, time bound in context (fleeting, youthful, passing through).
The strongest memory wasn’t committed to paper. My friend and I spent a day in East Berlin, passing through Checkpoint Charlie first thing in the morning, converting the requisite amount of Deutsch Marks into the East German currency. We went to one of the museums, walked around and generally marvelled at the difference a wall can make, wondered what we could buy with the money the East Germans so desperately wanted us to spend. The answer to that was books – my friend and I were both students of German at Melbourne University.
We found a book shop. There was a queue to get in – the number inside at any one time was strictly regulated. We stood in the queue with the locals and I, in English, unquietly, said to my friend how ridiculous I found it. The East German man in front turned to me solemnly, “We think so too”.
It was humbling. That’s what I remember.
Berlin Wall on Flickr
I uploaded my scanned images of the Berlin Wall to Flickr more than three years ago. My tags included “Berlin Wall”, Berlin, “Berliner Mauer”, mauer, “1988-89 trip”, Germany, scanned, and have ensured that my images are found, shared and appreciated.
Flickr is the perfect vehicle for resurrecting and sharing history from the depths of visual memory and old boxes of slides and photographs. The Flickrverse is currently being encouraged to share memories (via text and images) in the group Experience History: Berlin 1961-1989. See also Das geteilte Berlin 1945-1990.
Several of my Berlin Wall images have been added to galleries curated by other Flickr users, a new concept in Flickr which I haven’t yet explored, but should: Berlin Wall in Color, The Berlin Wall / Die Berliner Mauer, and the intriguing Smoke Screens & Mirrors.