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FUßGÄNGER:
"pedestrian"; "flâneur"; a "gentleman stroller of city streets"; "lounger"; "saunterer"; "loafer"; a "person who walks the city in order to experience it"; an "idle man-about-town"; a "complete philosophical way of living and thinking".
The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; newsstands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done. -Walter Benjamin,"The Flâneur"

BEN BRYNMOR FOWLER
Currently living in Ebisu, Tokyo. A lover of city living & city walking, cinema, music, fiction, currently writing a PhD on contemporary theatre in Britain and Germany, and developing an intense relationship with apple gadgets.

OTHER HOMES:
http://www.scoop.it/t/british-and-german-theatre-today
Instagram username: IBKHOV

Yesterday I almost lost my feet in the cold. But it was worth taking in another of Berlin’s outdoor monuments - the Berlin Wall Memorial that runs along Bernauer Straße up to Nordbanhof. The wall was at one of it’s widest points in this area, and the authorities in the East devised ever more complicated and stringent methods to prevent GDR citizens from escaping into the West. A section of the ‘no man’s land’ between inner wall and outer wall has been recreated which you can view from an observation platform, with it’s sequence of fences, screens, and guard towers. 

One of the most fascinating aspects of the history that is documented here is the escape attempts. What look like rusty train tracks in the pavement mark out the route of various escape tunnels dug under the earth from the east to the west. Tunnel 57 was named after the number of people who escaped through it, to emerge in a bakery on the other side, before it was discovered by border officials and sealed off. 

In the documentation centre there is a great exhibition with lots of news reel footage from the 60s through to the 80s, showing the construction of the wall and various escape attempts. A church was demolished and a whole cemetery was moved in order to construct the buffer zone between east and west. 

Make sure you don’t miss Nordbanhof - in the ticket hall there is a fascinating exhibition about the transport network during the times of Berlin’s division and the ‘ghost stations’ in the east. Some lines ran under the east section in order to connect bits of the west. The stations in the east were bricked up, patrolled by soldiers, and became hidden from view - the GDR recognised how they would become the focus of potential escape attempts into the west and devised extraordinary measures to prevent such attempts. Even the patrolling guards in the ghost stations were not above suspicion, and so were locked into bunkers where they could observe the trains from the west passing through, without yielding to the temptation to flee themselves. 

Berlin Wall history Berlin Germany
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  1. selysias-treasures said: You got some great photos here, congrats! :)
  2. luz-sonriente reblogged this from fussgaenger
  3. sabine said: You were right around the corner from mine!
  4. fussgaenger posted this