Berlin

There are strong echoes here of part of my Munich photo taken in February 1967 - just read its third paragraph.

At the left (once more) is a hill close to a tower. The hill is by far the largest Schuttberg out of Berlin's total of nine: it is 55 metres high and contains 26 million cubic metres of rubble, most of it rubble excavated from ruined city. It is called the Teufelsberg, the Devil's Mountain.

The adjacent tower is not an equivalent of Munich's tower. This is the Funkturm, or Radio Tower, built in the 1920s. Its structure is similar to but much smaller than that of the Eiffel Tower. Between 1935 and 1962 it broadcast - albeit with understandable interruptions - regular television programs.

The broad road dominating the scene is the easternmost section of the road leading to the central road corridor from Berlin, across East Germany and to West Germany. Its starting point is just to the west of the Brandenburg Gate, which is a short distance behind the vantage point for this photo.

The name of this section is the "Road of 17 June", a reference to the date in 1953 when a worker's uprising in East Berlin and East Germany was violently put down by Soviet tanks. Bertold Brecht's mocking, bitter poem about the official reaction to this event is worth reading - see the last paragraphs of this earlier blip.


PHOTOGRAPHIC INFO:
Camera: Minolta M1 (35mm film)
Kodachrome slide: 1/60th sec, f/11
The film speed would have been either 25 or 64 ASA/ISO.

[this blip created in April 2014]