Niederkirchnerstraße (not Kochstraße)

Time to head over to Kochstraße! At least that is what the card says. Here we have another massive building brutally hidden behind the wall. Some graffiti tries to cheer the misery up a bit. The back side text claims the building to be the old Gestapo head quarters, and the street to be Kochstraße.

Let's take a look at the back side already, so that you can see what it says. Unfortunately it is unwritten.

When researching this deeper I found that the text is  double wrong. The card is from Niederkirchnerstraße (formerly called Prinz-Albrecht-Straße). The house is not the old Gestapo head quarters. The head quarters was located at Prinz-Albrecht-Straße 8. That house was destroyed by the allied bombings 1945 and the ruins were torn down after the war. After World War II, in 1951, the authorities of East Berlin renamed Prinz-Albrecht-Straße to Niederkirchnerstraße in honour of Käthe Niederkirchner (1909–1944), a member of the communist resistance to the Nazis.

The house on the post card is instead the state parliament of Berlin (Abgeordnetenhaus). The house was built between 1892 and 1898 by the architect Friedrich Schulze, as the parliament of Preußen. Below you can see the house today. As always you can click the picture to see it in a larger version.


Visa Berlin Wall on a larger map

On the map below you can see the location of the house and the stretch of the Berlin wall.


Visa Berlin Wall på en större karta

Graffiti at Sebastianstraße

Time for another strange postcard from the old divided Berlin! This time we will go to Sebastianstraße, for a postcard booming of gray and blue colors. This photo is shot a bit south of the East Berlin city core and as you can see on the postcard below the wall brutally cut through along the street. This place was very close to the border crossing at Heinrich-Heine-Straße which I wrote about in my last blog post.

Berlin wall at Sebastianstraße (click to enlarge)

This postcard is an excellent example of how brutal the wall could cut off the two city parts. The wall was built in the middle of the road, leaving only the walkway. The houses on the left side and the tall house at the end were all belonging to West Berlin. As you can see the wall was heavily painted by graffiti. This was very common and the graffiti was often political. I can not manage to read what the red banner on the house facade says, but it is very possible that it is put there to send some message over to the eastern side. Further ahead you can see how people and cars had to fit on the little strip left when the wall had eaten most of the street. When looking at the sky I almost get the impression that the photographer or the card publisher exaggerated it to give the picture some color, some life or... some freedom.

See the map below to see how the wall was stretched (the red line). The picture on this postcard is taken at the yellow mark. The purple mark close to the northwest of the yellow mark was the Heinrich-Heine-Straße border crossing. Sebastianstraße crosses the  Heinrich-Heine-Straße just before that former border crossing. The Berlin wall stretch (in red) on the map is not yet complete, as the wall used to stretch all around West Berlin. I will paint the rest when I have time.

Show Berlin Wall on a larger map

When I had scanned this postcard and began to look around on Google Maps I could not find the nice old houses on the left side of the card. I was afraid that they by some reason hadn't survived the test of time. But to my big joy I found them after some searching! I had looked too far west, at the strip on the other side of the Heinrich-Heine-Straße. When looking more east, on the other side, I found it. And I was pleased to see that the houses are looking better than ever! Below you can navigate around the area today. The wall is long gone and it looks easier to park now! The eastern side is still an open area, one of many in Berlin that will be built one day. By some reason one of the houses at the left side is blurred out by Google when looking in some angles. I guess the house owners demanded that. I wonder why. The sky on the Google Streetview could really use some of that crazy blue sky from the postcard, as the picture is kind of dull. 

Show Berlin Wall on a larger map

This backside is unwritten. The text only localizes the picture to "Sebastianstraße", a bit vague as the street is many hundred meters long.

Back side (click to enlarge)

Hope you liked this card as much as I did! I find it very fun to find those places again and look around!

Heinrich-Heine Straße

Time for another postcard from the divided Berlin. Today we'll take a trip back to Heinrich-Heine Straße. This street goes from U-Bahn-stations Moritzplatz and Heinrich-Heine Straße.

The Heinrich-Heine border crossing

Above you can see the photo of this brutal barrier between west and east Berlin. The photo was taken heading towards the eastern part. It must have been harsh and pretty strange to live in the houses on the picture, so close to the wall, the fences and all the barbed wire. 

The border crossing at Heinrich-Heine Straße was one of the largest ones. The reason was that this crossing was used for inspection of goods and postal transports between the two halves of Berlin. It was also possible for West German citizens to enter East Berlin through this crossing.

Below you can see the location of the border crossing. The red line is the stretch of the outer wall, the one towards West Berlin. The purple box shows the location of the Heinrich-Heine-Straße border crossing.

Visa Berlin Wall on a larger map

More about this crossing can be read at www.berlin.de. As you can read there three men tried to flee to West Berlin through this crossing on 18 April 1962. They tried to crash through the checkpoint barriers with a truck. The checkpoint guards opened fire and hit all three. The driver, Klaus Brüske, managed to steer the truck into western territory but died on site due to his injuries. The other two had serious injuries but survived.

Extra slalom barriers were added to the checkpoint to prevent this kind of escapes, but still two men from West Berlin and two women from East Berlin made a similar attempt on 26 December 1965. The women was found hidden in the car. The driver, the 27-year-old Heinz Schöneberger, tried to escape but was shot to death by the East German guards. The three others were arrested.

The back side of the card is unfortunately unwritten.

Below you can see the same place today. The tall trees effectively block the view of the houses that can be seen to the right on the postcard. If you navigate in the street-view-map, some distance further ahead on Heinrich-Heine Straße, you will see the same houses though, today with a little bit more discrete facade colors. The other side of the road, now used to sell cars, was part of the checkpoint. The construction site that can be seen on the right side of the postcard ended up as a large white complex.


Visa Berlin Wall on a larger map

Let's take a trip to Berlin!

Welcome to my new blog! This blog will be about something as strange as postcards from a place that no longer exists. You can still go there physically and you can still see many of the buildings and places, but it will still be another place. Those postcards all come from a place that was artificially created and that only lived for some 50 years. This blog will be about the divided Berlin, as it was shown on postcards sent from either side of that dreadful wall.

My name is Anders and I am a 38 year old guy from Sweden. A bad thing is that I just can't stop collecting stuff. I am also a seasoned computer nerd, happily married to the most wonderful wife and a very proud father of a 4 month old little guy - the cutest one in the world! Well, about collecting stuff.. I have a big collection and a small collection. The big one is of vintage computers and video games from the 70:s and the 80:s. It fills a room and it can really give my wife a look I really don't want her to have. The smaller collection takes up only two books and it is around that collection this blog will spin. Well, it will not really be about the collection, but the actual objects. The collection is of postcards from the divided Berlin, from the day when the wall was there, when GDR tried to showoff huge concrete buildings and happy couples in otherwise empty streets and the west germans took pictures from the other side, often showing the wall.

Everything started with a trip to Berlin about 10 years ago. I fell in love with the city on the second day and it has been a love affair ever since. I have been there about ten times now and it feels a bit good that I know the streets there better than those in Stockholm, the pretty boring capital of Sweden. Some years ago I searched a Swedish auction site for Berlin related stuff. By just a coincidence I found a bunch of old postcards, for the divided time, which I found interesting. It was strange and fascinating to see the city I like so much from that very different time and so very different from today. It was also very interesting to read more about the background, the places on the postcards and even what has been written on some of the cards. I got hooked and started to buy more. A good thing with this is that it is pretty cheap and my wife does not get that mean look she gets from the computer collection.

My idea with this blog is to simply show my postcards to you and write some about them. I hope there will be some form crystallizing further on. I hope to be able to help you find the places on the cards and tell some background. I will also try to translate the messages.

So, let's start with a really classic site, the Checkpoint Charlie!

Checkpoint Charlie. Click the picture for a larger version!

This is such a classic picture that it almost doesn't require any explanation. The Checkpoint Charlie was likely the most well known border passage between the east and the west. It became a symbol of the cold war and the separation of the east and west Berlin. It was here were tanks from both sides stood, facing each other, during a very dire moment during the Berlin crisis, 1961. The border passage has also been part of more thriller books and movies than we can possibly mention here.

The photo on this postcard was taken against the border, facing the East Berlin side. The western soldiers look happy when speaking to the man in the leather trench coat. Maybe he told then that he just had been smuggling coffee and some western currency to his eastern relatives. On the eastern side it looks more empty. Just as much as the warning sign warns you that you, by going through the checkpoint, are leaving the American sector, the GDR state symbol greets you into the communistic eastern part.

The location of the Checkpoint C (Charlie is the name for C in the phonetic alphabet) was and still is on Friedrichstraße 43, some kilometer south of the Friedrichstraße S-bahn station. As you saw above I wrote "still is". Even though the Berlin wall now is gone some parts of the Checkpoint Charlie, mainly the guard shed, has been kept intact. There is a Berlin Wall museum next to the shed which actually is more interesting nowadays.
 
Here you can navigate around the same place today:


Show larger map

And below is a map to see where it is located. The red line shows where the outer section (the one closest to West Berlin) of the wall was stretched. The purple box shows the location of the Checkpoint Charlie border crossing.

Show Berlin Wall on a larger map



And now, let's have a look at the back!

The postcard was posted 1964, but according to the card the photo was taken after the 13 august, 1961. Well, that date is pretty obvious as it was the starting date of the construction of the Berlin wall. The card was posted to "Driver Harry Johansson" in Skövde, Sweden. The text was a short but nice standard greeting. Translated it says something like:

Hearty greetings from a very interesting vacation trip. Have seen a lot of East Berlin and the wall. Send my greetings to Karin!

Ingegerd

That's it for now. Hope you liked this first post in my very new blog! I hope to be back with another postcard from Berlin in a day or two!