It seemed somehow incongruous to run this piece without mentioning the small matter of the war on Europe’s borders, especially as the thousands of Ukrainians are making their melancholy way towards the west.
But the problem of the refugee still remains around the world and the iconography of the wall remains as potent as ever.
This is the piece the European published. Read here:
This is a companion piece they did not find room for. Berlin Voids by photographer Paul Raftery.
While Rafał Milach used the symbolism of chunks of the wall the wall to investigate its legacy English photographer Paul Raftery went for a walk.
In Berlin Voids, a series of images taken for an exhibition in 2014, he found that many traces of the wall in the city centre had been built over, such as in Potsdamer Platz with its underground station and Ritz Carlton Hotel. The further he wandered from the centre he discovered how the death strip had become a place for relaxation and sport where horses grazed, sunbathers dozed and walkers followed a well trodden path to a lake where before they would be shot if they went close.
What he found on a return visit this summer for a book project was that the land grab in the centre had intensified in areas such as Kreuzberg where real estate values have become too inviting to resist and buildings such as the vast black and glass offices of Axel Springer's German media empire bestride the course of the wall.
The use of the death strip as a place for leisure has also increased. In the spirit of New York’s urban walkway, the Highline, a riverside walk in the centre follows the curve of the river which had once been cut off by the wall and further afield he encountered Berliners on walks through forests where thousands of silver birches have been planted and whizzing along on electric bike tours, tending bees and taking up hobbies such as training falcons.
Raftery only revisited one scene; two blocks of flats side by side. It was obvious in 2014 that the house on the right had been in the East, shabby, boarded up and with rusting balconies. Now it is so smart it even boasts a trendy wine bar while its neighbour in the West is the scruffy one, disfigured by graffiti. The strip of land between them remains the same.
As for legacy, although many of the voids have been filled, the ghost of the wall lingers.
“I think Berlin has difficulty in dealing with its monuments because everything is laden with their 20th century history,” says Raftery. “They don’t want to rehabilitate everything and they don’t want to destroy everything because that would lead to all sorts of accusations, so they just let things disintegrate
“So the solution is to be pragmatic; ‘let’s not formalise too much, let some relics of the past disintegrate but use the places that are open as a resource for the city.’”
After and before