45 Wonderful Photos That Capture Street Scenes of East Berlin in the 1970s

Existed from 1949 to 1990, East Berlin consisted of the Soviet sector of Berlin established in 1945. The American, British, and French sectors became West Berlin, strongly associated with West Germany, while East Berlin was the de facto capital of East Germany. From 13 August 1961 until 9 November 1989, East Berlin was separated from West Berlin by the Berlin Wall.

In East German official usage, it became widespread in the 1970s to refer to the Western part of the city as "Westberlin", whilst calling the Eastern part simply "Berlin". Officially it was referred to as "Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR" ("Berlin, Capital of the GDR").

Here below is a wonderful photo collection that will bring you back to East Berlin in the 1970s.

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27 Amazing Color Snapshots Capture Street Scenes of Berlin in the Mid-1950s

Ten years after the end of World War II, Germany was rebuilding. Cities like Berlin, which had been severely damaged during the war were emerging from the rubble as the 'Wirtschaftswunder' or 'economic miracle' transformed West Germany.

In the immediate post-war period hundreds of thousands of allied troops were stationed in the divided country, many of them with cameras. Found recently at a flea market, these images were taken by a US Serviceman in Berlin from 1956-57.

Ten years after the end of the war, large swathes of Berlin still lay in ruins.

The scene during the winter of 1956 was bleak.

The Berlin Wall was still some years away from being erected in the winter of 1956 but even without it, Berlin was a divided city. Here, a sign in English, Russian and French marks the border of the American Sector.

The 'hunger rake' memorial at Templehof Airport. The memorial commemorates the Berlin Airlift of 1948/9 when allied aircraft kept West Berlin supplied by air, to break a Soviet blockade.

A snowy Berlin street scene in the winter of 1956. Translated, the sign reads 'Start of the Democratic Sector of Greater Berlin', marking the boundary of the Soviet sector.

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The Flying Bike of Max Wiedenhöft, ca. 1920s

Photo of Max Wiedenhöft, a German airplane designer, on a rocket-powered flying bicycle over Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, Germany. It is reported that he had started a aircraft company at Tempelhof Aiport and a speed of 167 km per hour would have achieved flight. The hope was to develop the flying machine as a rocket bike in order to achieve a speed of 400 km per hour.

Printed as an April Fool’s joke in a German newspaper. The picture was actually a photomontage created from a shot of Wiedenhoft taken the previous month, as he prepared to test his "rocket bicycle" on a rooftop at Tempelhof.

(via Geheugen van Nederland)

Four-Year-Old Boy of East Germany Is Tossed by His Father Into a Net Held by Firemen Across the Border in West Berlin, 1961

Four-year-old Michael Finder of East Germany is tossed by his father into a net held by residents and firemen across the border in West Berlin. The father, Willy Finder, then prepares to make the jump himself. Pictures taken from the booklet “A City Torn Apart: Building of the Berlin Wall”.

Four-year-old Michael Finder escaping communism from a window. October 7, 1961.

These photographs are taken around the same time the Berlin Wall was being erected. The Soviet occupation zone in Germany (and Berlin) suffered from serious movements of educated individuals from their sectors toward the West throughout the 1950’s. This brain drain encouraged the Soviet Union to begin construction of a “Fascist Protection Wall” that would keep East Germans protected from “Fascism” that the Western Allies had “not eradicated in their sectors “.

The father, Willy Finder, jumping to the West Berlin after him

Of course, this wall was only really to keep East Germans from emigrating to the West. The wall later became the Berlin Wall. These apartments were along Bernauer Straße (Bernauer Street) in Berlin. A line which saddled the border between East and West Berlin. After the wall was first constructed in 1961, many escape attempts were made through these apartment blocks. So much so, that the Soviets had to brick up the windows and raid the apartments of the people who lived there. They evicted the people living in those apartments. So what we are seeing when these people are jumping from the 4th floor are the people who are making a last ditch attempt at the West before all their (relatively safe) options out of East Berlin were gone for good.

The mother was the first one to jump. In this picture you can also see Willy and the 4-year-old Michael.

These apartments were later torn down and the Berlin Wall that most of us picture in the news reels, and have chunks of in our museums all over the world, was erected. Between 1945 and 1988, around 4 million East Germans migrated to the West. 3.454 million of them left between 1945 and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The great majority simply walked across the border or, after 1952, exited through West Berlin. After the border was fortified and the Berlin Wall was constructed, the number of illegal border crossings fell drastically. The numbers fell further as the border defenses were improved over the subsequent decades. In 1961, 8,507 people fled across the border, most of them through West Berlin. The construction of the Berlin Wall that year reduced the number of escapees by 75% to around 2,300 per annum for the rest of the decade. The Wall changed Berlin from being one of the easiest places to cross the border, from the East, to being one of the most difficult.

(Photo credit: The Central Intelligence Agency, via Rare Historical Photos).

Amazing Photographs Capture Everyday Life in East Berlin in the Mid-1980s

The first time Harf Zimmermann visited East Berlin’s Hufelandstrasse neighborhood, he sensed it was unlike any other neighborhood he’d known in East Germany. Linden trees lined the streets, as did many privately-owned shops, an unusual sight in a socialist state.

Mr. Zimmermann moved to Hufelandstrasse in 1980. He was 25 years old and living in his first apartment, a small studio assigned to him by the socialist administration because he’d agreed to fix a gutter that sometimes leaked through the window. Two years later, he started studying photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. Inspired by Bruce Davidson’s book, East 100th Street, which cataloged a single block in East Harlem, Mr. Zimmermann began regularly photographing people and places in his own neighborhood.

“I was out with my camera nearly every day,” he told The New York Times. “I had become part of the landscape.”

At first, he said, his neighbors found his creative endeavor confusing. Whenever they’d seen a camera in Hufelandstrasse before, it was typically a newspaper photographer who wanted them to pose in ways that enforced prevailing socialist tropes. Mr. Zimmermann, meanwhile, just asked them to stand simply as they were.

In 1986, he started shooting exclusively with a large-format camera, a practice he continued for the next year and a half. The photographs from that period are now collected in Hufelandstrasse, 1055 Berlin.

Herr and Frau Fleischer in their engagement outfits with their dog Putzi.

Frau Baer (center) with her daughter, her grandchild, and her daughter’s partner on the thirty-eighth anniversary of the founding of the GDR.

The rock group Phonolog.

My neighbor Frau Töpfer with her grandson René.

The bride and groom Frau and Herr Dressler, who have booked the package “traditional wedding, celebrating 750 years of Berlin.”

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25 Fascinating Vintage Photographs Capture Everyday Life in East Berlin During the 1970s and the 1980s

Bernd Heyden’s photographic vision remains fascinating to this day. Viewers not only experience passers-by from a former time, but gain insights into the living conditions and everyday life in East Berlin of the 1970s and 1980s. Along with people working in the stores and on the streets, Heyden took portraits of the old, frail and stranded as well as the merry, sad, cheeky children for whom the broken-down neighbourhood around Prenzlauer Allee was a gigantic playground.

For the East Berliner photographer Bernd Heyden, Berlin is first and foremost a backdrop against which life unfolds. All of a sudden, in finely gradated tones of grey, a sense of familiarity with this lost world is there again. Heyden (1940-1984) started taking pictures in the mid-1960s; beginning in 1967, he worked in the Club of Young Photographers, founded by Arno Fischer and Sibylle Bergemann. Nearly all of his existing photographs of Prenzlauer Berg were taken between 1970 and 1980, a total of well over one thousand motifs.

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22 Amazing Color Snapshots That Capture Street Scenes of Berlin in the Early 1950s

In the aftermath of World War II, Berlin was a city like nowhere else, with palpable atmosphere and decay. These amazing color photos from Found Slides show street scenes of Berlin in 1953.

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53 Fantastic Photos Capture Street Scenes of Berlin in the Early 1980s

Now it may be dubbed the 'Post-Tourist' capital of Europe, but back in the early-80s, Berlin was still cleaved in two by a wall. These fantastic photos show street scenes of Berlin from 1980 to 1983.

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The Story Behind the Iconic Photograph "Raising a Flag over the Reichstag" in 1945

Raising a flag over the Reichstag is a historic World War II photograph, taken during the Battle of Berlin on 2 May 1945. It shows Meliton Kantaria and Mikhail Yegorov raising the flag of the Soviet Union atop the Reichstag building.

Soldiers raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, 1945.

The photograph was reprinted in thousands of publications and came to be regarded around the world as one of the most significant and recognizable images of World War II. Owing to the secrecy of Soviet media, the identities of the men in the picture were often disputed, as was that of the photographer, Yevgeny Khaldei, who was identified only after the fall of the Soviet Union. It became a symbol of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.

When Khaldei arrived in Berlin, he considered a number of settings for the photo, including the Brandenburg Gate and Tempelhof Airport, but he decided on the Reichstag, even though Soviet soldiers had already succeeded in raising a flag over this building a few days earlier.

Khaldei took a Soviet flag with him in his luggage.

On 2 May 1945, Khaldei scaled the now pacified Reichstag to take his picture. He was carrying with him a large flag, sewn from three tablecloths for this very purpose, by his uncle. The official story would later be that two hand-picked soldiers, Meliton Kantaria (Georgian) and Mikhail Yegorov (Russian), raised the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, and the photograph would often be used as depicting the event. Some authors state that for political reasons the subjects of the photograph were changed and the actual man to hoist the flag was Alyosha Kovalyov, a Ukrainian, who was told by the NKVD to keep quiet about it.

“This is what I was waiting for for 1,400 days,” he said. “I was euphoric.”

However, according to Khaldei himself, when he arrived at the Reichstag, he simply asked the soldiers who happened to be passing by to help with the staging of the photoshoot; there were only four of them, including Khaldei, on the roof: the one who was attaching the flag was 18-year-old Private Alexei Kovalyov from Kiev, the two others were Abdulkhakim Ismailov from Dagestan and Leonid Gorychev (also mentioned as Aleksei Goryachev) from Minsk.

Soviet censors who examined the photo noticed that one of the soldiers had a wristwatch on each arm, indicating he had been looting.

Back in Moscow, Soviet censors who examined the photo noticed that one of the soldiers had a wristwatch on each arm, indicating he had been looting. They did not want to impose that image on their country. They asked Khaldei to remove one of the watches. Khaldei not only did so, but also darkened the smoke in the background. The resulting picture was published soon after in the magazine Ogonjok. It became the version that achieved worldwide fame.

Khaldei's edited picture on the Ogonjok magazine.

Later some Soviet sources claimed that the extra wrist watches were actually Adrianov compasses and that the Soviet Army touched out of the picture because they knew that this would be mistaken as a watch acquired by looting corpse rather than a piece of standard equipment. The Adrianov compass was a military compass designed by Russian Imperial Army topographist Vladimir Adrianov in 1907. Wrist-worn versions of the compass were then adopted and widely used by the Red and Soviet Army.

The original photo (left) was altered (right) by editing the watch on the soldier’s right wrist.

Subsequently, the photo continued to be altered. The flag was made to appear to be billowing more dramatically in the wind. The photo was also colorized. Throughout his life, Khaldei remained unrepentant about having manipulated his most famous photograph. Whenever asked about it, he responded: “It is a good photograph and historically significant. Next question please”.

Colorized version of the iconic photograph.

German magazine Der Spiegel wrote: “Khaldei saw himself as a propagandist for a just cause, the war against Hitler and the German invaders of his homeland. In the years before his death in October 1997 he liked to say: ‘I forgive the Germans, but I cannot forget’. His father and three of his four sisters were murdered by the Germans”.

(via Wikipedia and Rare Historical Photos)

Amazing Photos Capture Street Scenes of Berlin in the 1930s

Here is a collection of 43 photos that shows street scenes of Berlin during the 1930s.

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32 Rare and Amazing Vintage Photographs Capture the Ruins of Berlin Through a Soviet War Photographer

Last year, photographer Arthur Bondar heard that the family of a Soviet war photographer was selling his negatives. The photographer, Valery Faminsky, had worked for the Soviet Army and kept his negatives from Ukraine and Germany meticulously archived until his death in 2011. Mr. Bondar had seen many books and several exhibits of World War II photography but had never heard of Mr. Faminsky.

He contacted the family, and when he viewed the negatives Mr. Bondar realized that he had stumbled upon an important cache of images of World War II made from the Soviet side. The price the family was asking was high — more than Mr. Bondar could afford as a freelance photographer — but he took the money he had made from a book on Chernobyl and acquired the archive.

“I looked through the negatives and realized I held in my hands a huge piece of history that was mostly unknown to ordinary people, even citizens of the former U.S.S.R.,” he told The New York Times. “We had so much propaganda from the World War II period, but here I saw an intimate look by Faminsky. He was purely interested in the people from both sides of the World War II barricades.”

Most of the best-known Soviet images from the war were used as propaganda, to glorify the victories of the Red Army. Often they were staged. Mr. Faminsky’s images are for the most part unvarnished and do not glorify war but focused on the human cost and “the real life of ordinary soldiers and people.”

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