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In 1961 my elder brother was a student in Berlin learning German. He bought himself a decent camera and only took colour slides. Unfortunately, he died in 1990. His widow passed on to me some of his slides, mainly of Berlin but some of family also. I have around 300 slides of Berlin taken in 1961 and 1962. Some have faded a bit, but a lot are in good condition even though they are almost 60 years old. I went to Berlin in 2018 and visited some of the places that he had taken photos of. I found Berlin an interesting place and would like to go there again. I tried to get an up to date view of Brandenburg Gate from where he took his photos but I couldn't as it was blocked off by a huge TV screen set up so the Berlin football fans could watch their team progress in the World Cup. Unfortunately, they didn't get out of the group stage that year (he he) so the screen was a bit of a waste of time for them. Anyway, some pics of Brandenburg Gate before and after the wall and between there and the Reichstag.

June 1961. November 1961 Soldiers watching the wall being built between the Branderburg Gate and the Reichstag. A before and after next.
Regards
Oeter.

One of his photos was taken from Harzer Strasse looking down Sulzhayner Strasse. From the hotel I was staying at in the east of Berlin, I took a tram to Frankfurter Allee, the S-Bahn to Treptower Park and a number 104 bus to Harzer Strasse. Comparing the old photo to today, you would never know the Berlin Wall was ever there. It is all rebuilt and all the past erased. Well almost. I think the second tree down in the old photo is the same tree as the first one in my photo. The other item the same is the road sign showing 103-100 Harzer Strasse. They seem to be the same in both photos but moved to the other side of the road.
1962 2018 I don't know if anyone finds this interesting, but I did.
Regards
Peter.

Me too......the before and after shots especially so........

Pete

Takes me back to the Len Deighton books I devoured as a kid.

The Berlin Wall has always fascinated me, as has the Inner German Border. Infact, everything about East Germany fascinates me.

RDC wrote:The Berlin Wall has always fascinated me, as has the Inner German Border. Infact, everything about East Germany fascinates me.

Likewise.

I remember my short time there in the mid-eighties very fondly indeed - feel very lucky to have had that experience.

Was there in the early 70's, East Germany was grim to say the least.

Mind you 'twas the bringing down of the wall that upset the balance of tensions that kept some semblance of world order then.

Now we have a world tipping into and always on the cusp of anarchy with the collapse coming ever nearer as sovereign nation states give way to greed driven, morally bankrupt, unaccountable global corporations and monopolies.

Such is the consequence of a love of shopping, dissolute consumption and the avarice of possession.

When I was serving in Germany we weren't allowed to even go to Berlin. It was considered too risky.

My wife is German, her father was in the Bundeswehr. She tells the story of a school field trip to Berlin, where on the way out, the East German border guards came on the bus with a list of the kids of any member of the West German armed forces, and pulled all those kids off the bus. Their parents had to come and get them. Apparently it was a scare tactic, just a demonstration of how much intel they had on their opponents.

We spent 12 years in Germany, would love to go back now and see what was actually on the other side of those fences we stared at all those years.
I'd always at the border guards, most of the time, they just pointed a rifle at me, maybe they regained their sense of humor by now.

I worked with a chap from the other side of the wall many years ago. He always maintained it was actually OK on the Eastern side and he and his family struggled with many things including the disparity in wages when the wall came down.