After The Wall
A photographer walks the length of Berlin's urban scar.
By Martin C. Pedersen
Photography by Thomas Meyer
November 2003
German photographer Thomas Meyer was visiting Berlin on the historic day
in 1989 when the Iron Curtain fell. "I remember going out into the
street," he says, "and seeing people streaming over the border."
Eight years later he moved to the bustling new capital and began photographing
the area where the wall had stood. As physical traces of the boundary gradually
disappeared, a kind of no-man's-land emerged. "It was amazing,"
Meyer says. "There was all this free space in the middle of the city,
and it wasn't developed yet."
In 2001 Meyer decided to document the path of the former wall at various
points in a six-kilometer stretch. Whenever he found dramatic juxtapositions
between formally divided halves of the city, he captured two views: one
pointing east, the other west. "First I went to the wall area and took
layout pictures with a small-format camera," he explains. "From
those I decided what views I should photograph. Then I took images with
a large-format camera. I have to take a picture first, before taking
the picture."
The photographer currently lives in the former East Berlin, where rents are low
and a burgeoning creative scene is taking shape. "A lot of artists from
France, England, and America have moved here to live and work," he says.
"It's like Prague in the early nineties." And though the pace of
redevelopment in the city has slowed considerably due to a stagnant German
economy, changes near the site of the wall are inevitable. "You can see it
in the pictures," Meyer says. "The image of the Potsdamer Platz, with
the small skyscrapers? When the wall came down there was nothing there. It was
like a desert." Eventually, Meyer predicts, all traces of this great urban
scar will disappear. Think of it now as a slowly healing wound.
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As evidence of the Berlin Wall disappears, Thomas Meyer photographs the
transformations along its former path. New construction at Potsdamer Platz
(above) on the western side is directly across from the unchanged
Behmstrasse (below) to the east. |
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