Tag Archives: Berlin Wall

Mar 28 2026
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Daily Post, Urban scene

Windows into the 20th century

Friday 27th March 2026, 1.35pm (day 5,328)

Near Checkpoint Charlie, 27/3/26

Berlin is where we’ve come for a few days. This part of it has been much changed in the last 36 years, for up until 1989, the Berlin Wall ran right through here: there is a marker on the road near this point, with the former Checkpoint Charlie (now a magnet for tourists and hustlers alike) just off shot to the right: though this was only a small and relatively insignificant part of the border infrastructure at this point on Friedrichstrasse. Nowadays these displays of photographs and maps are all that remain. The Wall retains such a significant place in the memory of people my age (and I’m not even German) but it only lasted 28 and a bit years (August 1961 – October 1989): Joe will be that age soon enough.

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Aug 24 2018
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Daily Post, Urban scene

By the wall

Thursday 23rd August 2018, 12.20pm (day 2,555)

East Side Gallery, 23/9/18Some parts of the old Berlin Wall remain in the city. Probably they could have been demolished back in 1990 but the authorities realised — correctly — that they were valuable as memorials and/or tourist attractions. Or, as in the case of the East Side Gallery, which runs beside the Spree for about a kilometer near the Ostbahnhof, an art installation; this long line of concrete has been decorated by a range of murals, including this one of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, who seems to disdain the busker beside him, playing as he is on a load of old water pipes, or something.

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Feb 25 2018
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Daily Post, Interior

The Berlin Wall (remnant)

Friday 23rd February 2018, 1.55pm (day 2,374)

Berlin wall, 23/2/18

I wonder how many reputed bits of the Berlin Wall there are remaining in the world. I used to have at least one bit of rubble that was definitely part of it, because I removed it myself, on my one visit to Berlin in September 1990 when there was still quite a bit of it standing and being pulled down by tourists. Every bit of it that I could see at that time had been heavily graffitied so either this big, relatively clean chunk standing in the Imperial War Museum in London is from something else, or (more likely) this stood on the inside, facing the no-man’s land that stood between East and West from 1961-1989.

Whatever. Decent museum, the IWM, takes an even-handed view of its subject matter. And free, for now.

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