East german utopia!

Let's go behind the wall again! Behind the wall, on the eastern side, everything was modern, wonderful and just built yesterday! The only trouble living here was the struggle between choosing between the newly built roads when taking your new Trabi out or selecting which of all coffeehouses or restaurants at the newly built centre houses to visit. At least this was the image the GDR government wanted to give when printing post cards.

Just as a major part of the post cards from West Berlin shows the wall the ones from the East Berlin shows arranged and fictionally beautiful scenes from the socialist utopia. This was the picture they wanted people receiving the post cards to see. As we all know the real life in the GDR was something different, something never shown on post cards.

This time we see nice scenes from the Interhotel at Unter den Linden, Schönhauser Alle, the youth club Greifswalder Straße, the Friedrichstraße train station and Rathausstraße:

Of the buildings on this post card the Interhotel at Unter den Linden is, as far as I know, demolished. This hotel was located in the corner of Friedrichstraße and Unter den Linden.

The night shot from Schönhauser Allee is from a place up in Prenzlauer Berg. The house on the picture is unfortunately blurred on Google Maps. This is unfortunately a common problem in Germany. House owners tend to think that a snapshot of their house facade on Google maps hurts their personal integrity and they request Google to blur it. The result can be seen below.



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The Jugendklub (youth club) on Greifswalder Straße is no more. You can see a picture on how it looked before it was torn down on Flickr.

The Friedrichstraße station still exists and is one of the more busy train stations in the eastern parts as it has both S-Bahn and U-Bahn lines. The station now looks like this:


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The only of the houses built during the GDR time that still stands is the big complex at Rathausstraße. This house stands just by the TV tower at Alexanderplatz, neighbor to the Rotes Rathaus (the Berlin city hall):


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The back side is unwritten:

I hope you liked this little trip through the GDR utopia! Interestingly two out of three of the houses built from that era are now torn down. I guess that was never the plan when they took that fancy photo of happy people outside the youth club or that photo of the fancy concrete hotel at Unter den Linden.

Wall Riders

Not all of my post cards are gray and full of barb wire. Today I'll show something slightly more positive. This card is sent 1990 and the wall is no longer called an "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart" and it is no longer used to keep people from fleeing the GDR. On the picture below people are riding the wall for fun and to look over the border. This would have been totally unacceptable some years earlier. The western citizens had towers and other spots where they could glimpse over the wall, but not like this.

The card is called "Mauerreiter", german for "wall riders". The text also says "so gefällt's uns besser!", which means something like "like this we like better".

Unfortunately I can not find out where the photo is taken. Maybe someone reading this can help?

The card is sent to Sweden, to the city Helsingborg.

The text says, translated from swedish:

Dear both of you!

We have nice days here in Berlin. Today we have hacked on the wall and gone through a historical museum. East Germany still differed a lot from west. Tomorrow we will travel back home again. Tack care! Hugs /[some name i can not decipher, maybe Karin]

Dear Lennart...

It is time for one of the most interesting post cards I have in my collection! This time it is not that much about the front of the card, but the message written on the back. It is a post card sent from a man named Klaus, in the former GDR, to a man called Lennart, likely living in Sweden.

The front of the card is a typical GDR card, with old and new architecture:

The pictures are, from top left and down:

• The Unter den Linden memorial "Neue Wache". Originally built as a guard house for the troops of the crown prince of Prussia. Used as a war memorial since 1931.
• Ernst-Thälmann-Park
• Rathausstrasse
• Biergarten at Spittelmarkt
• Märkisches Ufer

The back of the card contains a long written message with lots of details about the thoughts of a man named Klaus, living in the GDR, at the very end of the lifetime of that country. The card is dated 4/3 1989, just some half year before the wall came down. It involves thoughts about the rapid political changes in the USSR and other former communist states. The card was sent to his friend Lennart. This is a typically Swedish name, so I assume it was sent to Sweden.

The card was likely sent in an envelope, as it has no visible address or stamp.

If you have problems reading the text, here is a transcript. I have tried to keep the original spelling.

Dear Lennart,
Thank you very much for your letter. I'm very glad.
I see it has also some advantage to live in the GDR. I have not such a trouble with my flat. It is quite cheap (106.- Mark p. month) I with you that you find a good new flat.
It is interesting to read that you have visited a mine. Would you work as a miner? It is not a very hard work? 
It is interesting to read, that you don't like the policy if Gorbatchow. Can you say me some reasons more for your oppinion? I think he is a clever man, but he has a long way to get success. The economical situation becomes not better in the USSR. And this is terrible. If Gorbatchow want to be successful, then he needs the economical development. The democracy alone and the right to say the truth is not enough. What do you think about the situation in Afghanistan and Paraguay? Do you see a future there?
Dear Lennart I have a request. Could you send me the record "The Lion and the Cobra" by Sinead O'Connor? I could send you a record from here too or a book. Ok? Please write soon my dear friend.
Best wishes Klaus

It amazes me that there could be so much thoughts and information at just one side of a post card! I really wish Klaus got the Sinead O'Connor record! I hope Lennart wrote back! I wonder what their previous and later conversations was about?

If someone out there have any idea about who Lennart and Klaus might be, please tell me! I would be very happy to find out more. I guess it would be almost impossible to find an email address to them now, 24 years later, but it would be very interesting to write to them now, to see if they have any thoughts about the historical changes after their post card.

Here follows some views from the post card, as they look today.

Neue Wache

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Ernst-Thälmann-Park

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Rathausstraße

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Spittelmarkt

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Märksiches Ufer

Visa större karta

I hope you found this card as interesting as I do!

Potsdamer Platz

Time to go black and white again. This time we will head over to Potsdamer Platz, one of the most sad examples of the destruction of Berlin. Before the war this used to be one of the liveliest places in Berlin. It was an important public square and a major traffic intersection. It had lots of shops and houses. Potsdamer Platz is located about 1 km (1,100 yd) south of the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag (German Parliament Building), and close to the southeast corner of the Tiergarten park. It is named after the city of Potsdam, some 25 km (16 mi) to the south west, and marks the point where the old road from Potsdam passed through the city wall of Berlin at the Potsdam Gate.

The allied bombings were heavy here. Potsdamer Platz was more or less completely ruined. After the war it was left desolate and later on the Berlin wall stretched through the area. Large no mans land areas stretched through the area.

As you can see the area is wide open and torn apart by the wall. The old style house to the upper left is the side of the state parliament of Berlin (Abgeordnetenhaus) that I have written about in an older post.

Here you can see roughly the same area today, on Google Maps:

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Below you can see an old picture of how Potsdamer Platz could look like before the destuction:

Potsdamer Platz is now rebuilt, with several houses with interesting modern architecture. The place has again become an important traffic intersection and where the wall once tore the place apart there are now again people and shops. 

Below you can see the Sony Center house from below and night time.

And finally the back side of the card:

Meanwhile in the GDR

All posts this far has been about post cards from West Germany. Few - if any - post cards from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) showed the wall or the brutally divided city. What did the post cards from the GDR show then? Of course they showed the success, the progression, the architecture and the happiness in the young socialist state. The pictures where taken from locations not far from the western ones, sometimes from just the other side of the wall, but still they are completely different.

On the above picture you can see classical buildings mixed with new ones. 

• The first picture, at the upper left, shows a scene from the buildings around Unter den Linden. Classical architecture was not directly correct according to communist ideas, but they were built by workers and the efforts of those were celebrated. The buildings are a bit younger than they look, mainly built during the late 1700:s and the 1800:s.
• To the upper right you have the Palast der Republik, the huge parliament building of GDR. The building was erected between 1973 and 1976 and housed the parliament, a concert hall, restaurant, and much more. It was finally demolished 2008 to make room for a rebuilt Stadtschloss. I will likely spend a complete blog post about this sole building one day.
• To the lower left there is a picture of the Spreepark. It opened 1969 as Kulturpark Plänterwld. It was an amusement park where the citizens of the GDR could amuse themselves for a while. It was the only constant amusement park in the GDR. The park continued to be open after the unification but was closed around 2001 due to economical problems. It can be visited by guided groups at restricted times.
• To the lower right we see Rotes Rathaus and Fernsehturm, the TV tower. Behind Rotes Rathaus is Alexanderplatz. This place, together with the Stalinallé, was built to brag about. In my collection of post cards from the divided Berlin I have huge amounts of cards with various motives around here. The Alexanderplatz area was really dull when the wall came down, but nowadays it has bloomed to one of the more interesting ones in Berlin and the TV tower is still very cool in its futuristic pride.

The back side is unwritten.

If you like my blog posts, please share them to your friends! It would make me really happy to see more people finding the blog!

[Aftonbladet] [DN-norrsken]

Wall stays another 100 years

In my previous post I showed a card where Walter Ulbricht said that there would be no wall. The wall was built less than two months after he said that at a press conference. Today we will see what his successor, Erich Honecker, says about the wall.

The card from is from the same place as my previous post about Sebastianstrasse. The new thing here is the news paper clip in the upper right part.

The clip is part of the post card, not something glued on top. The quote from Honecker says: "Wall stays another 100 years". Luckily Honecker was wrong. The newspaper was printed 20 January 1989. Honecker resigned as general of the state on 18 October 1989, succeeded by Egon Krenz. The border passages was opened on that tense night of 9 November 1989 and the wall was physically removed during 1990. 

The back side is unwritten.

[Sveriges Radio 1] [Sveriges Radio 2] [DN]

No one has the intention to erect a wall!

This time we'll take a look at a grand political betrayal. Let's start with the post card. The big quote at the bottom says: No one has the intention to erect a wall!

This post card pictures Walter Ulbricht, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the German Democratic Republic between 25 July 1950 – 3 May 1971. This means that he ruled GDR during the time when the wall was erected, starting at 13 August 1961.

The post card contains a quote from Walter Ulbricht, from the magazine Neues Deutschland (new Germany). Translated the quote says:

"I understand your question as, that there are people in West Germany, who wish, that we mobilize the construction workers of the capital of the GDR, to erect a wall. To me it is not known, that such an intention exists. The construction workers of our capital occupy themselves mainly with building of apartments, and our manpower is for this fully deployed."

This was said by Walter Ulbricht at an international press conference the 15 June 1961. The wall construction was started less than two months later.

It is a bit amusing how Ulbricht, in the first sentence, turns it as it was the west germans that wanted a wall. As we now all know the wall was built to keep the GDR citizens inside GDR. It was built to stop large amounts of GDR citizens from escaping to West Germany.

There is a very interesting video clip from the mentioned press conference at YouTube:

The back side is unwritten.

In my next post I will follow this post card up with a related one, again with a quote. That time it will be from the successor, Erich Honecker.

Wallspotting

Here is another colorful and cheerful card from the Berlin wall days. As you can see they really had to distort the sky to make something colorful out of the depressing sights.

This is one of many cards with multiple small sights from the divided Berlin. Therefore it is a bit hard to show you the location of everything.

• The house on the upper right picture is the from the state parliament building on Niederkirchnerstraße, which I wrote about in another post.
• The picture at the lower left of course shows the Brandenbuger Tor. I haven't posted any pictures from there yet, but as you can imagine there are many post cards from that spot.
• The lower middle picture shows a staircase from which people from the western part could look over the wall. The eastern people was of course not allowed to something similar. If you read Thomas Brussigs book Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee you can find out what things the western people could shout to the eastern from such stands.
• The lower right picture is from the Checkpoint Charlie area, which I wrote about in my first blog post.

This post card was posted 20th february 1989. That means that it was posted just about nine months before the wall came down.

The post card was sent to Sweden, to the town Olofström. The greeting is in swedish and translates to:

Hi!

Am now in Berlin!
The trip went well, just some bumpiness on the boat. Yesterday we were at the zoo + the aquarium. We have also had time for a disco called "Society".

Hugs

Pernilla

Neukölln

Welcome to Neukölln! As you can see on this post card it hosts nice restaurants with nice beer! The wall and the barb wire will make sure you end up home, in your own eastern bed.

The big sign says "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit", which translates to "Unity, justice and freedom". It is very ironic that there had to be a wall with barb wire to protect those big values.

The bar on the picture is Heidelberger Krug. This place was subject to a massive tunnel project. In the basement a big escape tunnel was built. You can read more about this interesting story here:

• http://www.grenztruppen-der-ddr.de/podium2/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=1947&start=25
• http://www.welt.de/kultur/history/article106140295/Die-meisten-Fluchttunnel-gab-es-in-Berlin-Neukoelln.html
• http://www.berlin.de/imperia/md/content/lzpb/aktuelles/berliner_fluchten.pdf

The house still exists, but now houses a restaurant called Schweigel, Budike & Destille.


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If you would like to visit this historical place and maybe eat and the restaurant, then you have the location on this map.


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The back side is unfortunately unwritten for this one as well. I will try to scan some of my written ones. They are often just greetings to friends at home and often answers to radio competitions, but sometimes they can give a glimpse about the life behind the wall, the frustration and the longing for freedom. Again it is ironic that the latter word is the same as on the sign on this postcard.

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!