Red dot

A image of Berlín east in 1987

1980. Berlin, crossing the wall
Two different worlds divdided by a wall. In 1987 no visas to stay or live in Berli East, only just a day visa and for especial situations it should be arranged in the border or with an travel agency. A good choice to cross the wall for one day walk is get a ticket to visit the Pergamon museum exhibitions.
Still today after so many years, when I remember the times I crossed into the eastern part of Berlin the penetrating smell of coal and the layer of smoke that was created over the streets with the low atmospheric pressure of the freezing winters. It is an indelible image and smell.
Crossing the Berlin Wall was the dream of many people, especially from the eastern part and the press from West Berlin. The political commissars followed our steps: what you bought, what you photographed and, above all, who you talked to or had a coffee with a tasty apple strudel.
The clock of time in East Berlin seemed to have stopped forty or fifty years ago, and the contrast I encountered was brutal. Arriving at the station and passing through the border control transported us back in time to a black and white film: the way people dressed, the Trabant 601s that went from one side to the other, smoking like chimneys, or the Barkas B1000s. Without a doubt, the Trabant in its many versions was my favorite car, just as the trams gave the city, along with that strong smell of coal, a unique setting.
My visits to the Pergamon Museum, each time they brought a new collection, meant arriving early in the morning and spending the whole day there, since overnight and residence permits were almost impossible to obtain. When leaving East Berlin you had to leave all the money you had left; you couldn’t leave with a single cent, or you risked being accused of whatever they could think of.

The last time I saw Honecker was on May 1, 1989. I was covering that event with another French photographer from the Gamma agency, and getting the 300mm Tamron lens across the border was quite an odyssey to tell. On that occasion, the weekly A Nosa Terra gave us an accreditation letter, but several political commissars never left us until we were back across the wall.