Brian Rose's Travel Journal
- 1997 Update -

Berlin 1996

When I began photographing the East/West border in 1985 it was hard to imagine that some ten years later almost all traces of the former Iron Curtain would be erased from the map. I travelled the border in '85, '87, '89, and '91, and recently I have returned to photograph the rapidly changing center of Berlin where the wall and no man's land once cut through and surrounded half of the city.

Potsdamer Platz, for more than 40 years the abandoned heart of Central Europe, is now one of the largest construction sites in the world. A forest of cranes overlooks a few fragments of the wall and the open field above the buried Hitler bunker. Thousands of tourists a day visit the bright red Infobox where they encounter multi-media presentations on the future of Berlin and the new Europe, and where an observation deck offers a sweeping view of the Sony and Daimler-Benz complexes.

The Brandenburg Gate is once again open, and the embassies around Pariser Platz are being rebuilt. Even the Hotel Adlon, the premier hotel of Berlin early in the century, is returning to the square where its rooms overlooked the Nazi parades of the '30s. Nearby, the Reichstag, surrounded by scaffolding, is being reconstructed with a glass dome above the new home of the German Bundestag.

Checkpoint Charlie, once the Allied crossing point in Berlin, is now at the heart of a new business and shopping district along the Friedrichstrasse. Tourists still flock to this place, the scene of some of the tensest moments of the Cold War, to visit the funky Checkpoint Charlie museum. For the moment, a golden Statue of Liberty stands atop a former guard tower, and a cut-out poster of Philip Johnson stands before his building as construction proceeds on the American Business Center.

Brian Rose
January, 1997

Up to The Brian Rose Website

Website by Eric Szczerbinski - EricS10332@aol.com