Classic cars forum & vehicle restoration.

[peter scott]

Amateur (silent) cine footage http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=A3SP1d9FbQo

[Uncle Joe]

I've only just seen this link, absolutely fascinating. Thanks for posting!

[peter scott]

Bearing so many scars it is a fascinating place. We've been on two occasions.
Firstly just after the wall came down and then again some years later.

My mother was there just before the war and although I stupidly hadn't talked to her much about it before she died, I took some of the old tourist maps that she had with her. There is an amazing re-use of bombed out buildings. Today they look different being largely devoid of cornicing and other detail, but the window and door openings are in many instances the original. Unfortunately at the address where she had stayed there was just a gap site.

It was really weird looking at pre-war pictures of Potsdammer Platz looking like Piccadilly Circus and comparing it with the deserted bomb site that it was at our first visit. Of course when we visted again years later it had been transformed yet again but places like Anhalter Banhoff are still just memorials having been largely demolished because the Russians had cut off all its feeding rail routes.

Peter

[pigtin]

I worked there for a few weeks in 1980 and we took time off one weekend for a short coach excursion from Checkpoint Charlie to an East Berlin Memorial Park.
Checkpoint Charlie was spooky, with buildings still pockmarked with bullet holes and a really stringent inspection by the Eastern military before the bus could go through. Particularly memorable was a smelly soldier with long filthy fingernails who wanted to check I was not carrying western newspapers.
In order to ‘cut a dash’ the coach was the most modern and streamlined available in the western world, contrasting strongly with the crude Skoda lorries, smoke enveloped Trabants and the occasional Wartburg.

Our (East European) guide spouted wall-to-wall propaganda throughout the trip, through what resembled old London bomb sites, she pointed out the glorious restoration, building and development projects about to start. This caused us to mumble about what they might have been doing for the last thirty years.
On the way back, she lectured us on the lack of homelessness or unemployment in East Germany. It was too much for one of my companions, who pointed out: if WE had to guard every yard of our border to prevent citizens escaping, we also, would have no unemployment. The trip finished in an atmosphere, with our guide sulking.

Don.