The changes of the Berlin Wall

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Michael Cramer was a member of the football club in Ennepetal. The Ennepetal Football Club made a trip to West Berlin in 1963 and for this trip, his aunt gave him a camera. This was the first camera he had owned and he took some of his very first photos on the Bernauer Straβe Street. At that time, there was a podium from which you could take a look at the other side. Cramer stresses that: “We just didn’t know any directions. It didn’t matter to us whether it was north, south or west, everywhere there was east.” Cramer was particularly astonished by a corner building on the Eberswalder Straβe Street. Every time he visited Berlin, he went there to observe how much the city façade and the Wall had changed: how the windows had been covered with bricks, how the houses had been demolished over the years, and so on.

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Michael Cramer

Michael Cramer was born in the middle of West Germany in 1949 and already as a child he came into contact with the issue of the division of Germany through the friends of his parents. After he completed his studies in Mainz, he moved to West Berlin, where he lived very close to the wall and he also repeatedly made trips to the eastern part of the city. He worked as a teacher and in 1989, he was voted to the German parliament for the Greens where he devoted himself predominantly to issues of transport and traffic policy. His initiative of the “Berlin-Wall Trail” – a bicycle route along the former Berlin Wall – dates back to this period. After he was elected to the European Parliament in 2004, he expanded this initiative to encompass all of Europe and called it the “Iron Curtain Trail,” a 9,000 kilometer-long bicycle path along the former Iron Curtain. He has already biked large parts of this trail himself due to the fact that since 1979 Cramer hasn’t owned an automobile.

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Berlin, Bernauer Straße/Eberswalder Straße

Available in: English | Deutsch

The Eberswalder Straße is a street in central Berlin. It begins as an extension of the Bernauer Straße. Both are located in the quarter of Prenzlauer Berg in the district of Pankow. With the start of construction of the Wall in 1961, the border strip crossed the intersection exactly at the transition to the Bernauer Straße. In the fall of 1961, a five-meter tall, wooden curtain was erected there in order to prevent eye contact between the inhabitants of East and West Berlin across the barriers. A little later, this curtain was replaced with a large and massive concrete wall. Berlin, Bernauer Straße. Source: private archive of Mr. Cramer.

Berlin, Bernauer Straße/Eberswalder Straße

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The changes of the Berlin Wall

Michael Cramer