Posted on 05/08/2012 7:38:49 PM PDT by SWAMPSNIPER
Photographer Stefan Koppelkamm first photographed East Germany in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the reunification. He revisited the same locations a decade later, and rephotographed them from exactly the same viewpoints to document the drastic social and economic transformations that came about during the time between the photos.
(Excerpt) Read more at petapixel.com ...
I don’t understand people who can’t see the difference.
I was in East Berlin for a few hours or so in 1980. They were still doing reconstruction of bombed sites then, 35 years after the end of WWII. BTW, today is the 67th Anniversary of V-E Day.
Yes, indeed, freedom makes an amazing difference.
/johnny
The “before” pictures look like Detroit. I don’t think there will be any “after” pictures for Detroit.
Beautiful. Thanks for posting that.
I had heard this in the 1980s - the East German government didn’t bother cleaning up the war mess. This is great to see - shove it in the FACE of leftists. They had 45 years to clean it up and didn’t bother.
As an Army brat, I had an occasion to take a tour into East Berlin (they were allowed then, for some reason ... no pictures allowed) in either 1960 or 1961 (I was 15 at the time) and found the place very depressing and desolate.
That is what the photos made me think of as well.
It’s great, but it’s not completely clear. Text says 1 decade apart, title says plural decades apart
My friend's brother still lived over in the East. When he visited he found the family had a ration ticket of 1 gallon of paint per year. They were saving them up hoping that paint would be once again on the market. I believe they lived in the town where modern paint was invented.
The only excuse for the GDR is that the Russians assigned tasks to them to do (industrially) and they did them, and the people who lived there simply didn't count.
You probably don't know it but even the most modern office buildings for party officials in Russia itself had wooden door lintels and doors. They look pretty enough, some were carved ~ but finding a metal lintel or door was difficult because ALL metal production went first to the Military.
And that meant ALL. One of the reasons older pictures of metal incorporated in Russian, and East-Bloc architecture looks like it's been rehabilitated from somewhere else.
East Germany looked about the same as it did in 1945.
Europeans have had a lot of war over the centuries and are well versed in how you deal with it. For the GDR it was just a case of waiting until the foreign occupiers left.
The Ernst Thaelman Factory in Suhl did some good work
communism produces sloth and corruption....as the society crumbles so does the infrastructure.
capitalism (even just a little bit of it) offers freedom and choice and inspires innovation and industriousness
The Trabaunt. Just like Obama’s Chevy Volt.
It is interesting to note that the Germans have tried to preserve and restore their historic buildings.
I tried celebrating by pulling one of these moves and promptly got the cops called on me. < |:(~
Even Worse!
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