BY THE TIME Tegel Airport officially opened in 1974, Berlin had already seen more than its share of aviation history. Half a century earlier, Otto Lilienthal launched his innovative gliders from a hilltop in Lichterfelde, and throughout the Weimar years and into WWII and the Cold War airfields sprung up all over the city.
THE GENESIS OF Berlin as we know it today happened just over a century ago, when, on October 1, 1920, the modern city of Greater Berlin (“Groß-Berlin”) was formed from eight adjacent cities and dozens of outlying districts. The formation of this new super-city doubled Berlin’s population from 1.9 million to what was, at the time, a staggering 3.9 million people, making it the world’s fifth-largest city after Tokyo.
FOR ACCLAIMED FASHION photographer Kristian Schuller, his recent return to Berlin is a homecoming in the truest sense. Born in Halchiu, Romania, Schuller emigrated to Berlin with his parents as a child, where his university years at UdK saw him studying fashion design with Vivienne Westwood and photography with F.C. Gundlach. From there an international trajectory of increasing recognition took him from London to Paris to New York, where he became one of the fashion world’s most sought-after photographers, shooting international celebrities for some of the world’s biggest style magazines.
IMMEDIATELY UPON ITS completion in 1970, Berlin’s Haus der Statistik (which stood north of Alexanderplatz in the shadow of the just-built Fernsehturm) took its place as one of the central organs of the GDR state apparatus. With the collection of data and statistics for all of East Germany as its goal, the eleven-story complex housed numerous bureaucratic units, including several floors of Stasi offices. Its street-level businesses were the ultimate in urbane GDR style, hosting two lounges (Jagdklause and the fabulously named Mocca-Eck), a hunting/fishing shop, and Natascha, a boutique offering the latest Soviet imports.
FOR THE PAST decade, journalist Ciarán Fahey has been documenting Berlin’s abandoned places: factories, train stations, hospitals, power stations, shuttered embassies, decaying villas, and everything in between. On his website Abandoned Berlin he documents these disappearing places in photos and words, focusing on the stories hidden behind crumbling walls and boarded-up windows. The human side of these modern ruins lies at the heart of his project: as the site’s welcome message says, “every crumbling building, creaking floorboard, fluttering curtain and flaking piece of paint has a tale begging to be told.”
DURING ITS FOUR-plus decades of existence, the GDR was a unique geopolitical paradox. Its place at the heart of the Cold War conflict belied the simple, day-to-day lives of the vast majority of its citizens. This paradox manifests itself visibly in the architecture of the former GDR, where often-cosmic abstract and geometric tendencies exist alongside the drab and mundane.
THE U7 IN its current form was largely a product of Cold War-era West Berlin, and is arguably the most “West Berlin” of all U-Bahn lines. Despite being Berlin’s longest U-Bahn line (as well as one of the longest underground urban rail lines in all of Europe at 31.8 kilometers), every single one of its stations, from Rudow in the southeast to Rathaus Spandau in the northwest, falls within the borders of the former West Berlin.
THE SIEMENSBAHN WAS a short, “spur”-style urban railroad that served Berlin’s northwestern district of Siemsstadt from 1929 until 1980. Consisting of only three stations, it originated at Jungfernheide (a still-active station on the present-day Ringbahn), crossing the Spree and passing through the Wernerwerk and Siemensstadt stations before ending at Gartenfeld.
