Flickr is full of amazing photos of the period after the war and during the division of the city. Well worth an explore, so it is.
Speaking kind of which, a brief thing about a famous-ish feature of Berlin, the Anhalter Banhof - a now pretty much non-existent but once impressively large main station. It's all very easily searched for online, of course, but in brief summary it was badly damaged during the last war, and found its reason for existence removed due to the isolation of West Berlin from the station's feeder lines from what became the DDR.
To repeat a photo posted above, this shows a new-ish pedestrian and cyclist bridge following the course of the lines from the Anhalter Banhof:
Incidentally, this was taken from a viewing platform attached to the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, in which lies this:
And this:
It's a great museum, which anybody of a mind to could happily spend a day or more in, and my couple of photos do it a disservice. Anyway, it also has this (harking back to the Berlin Airlift):
And, more germane to this (ha ha ha, uh), well, this:
That is one of the two metal sculptures that used to adorn the main entrance to the Anhalter Banhof, with slightly unsettling shrapnel and/or bullet holes visible.
It used to be half way up the side of this. Well, the thing that this rather lovely model, also in the Technical Museum, represents:
After an awful lot of aerial bombing and artillery fire and all sorts of almost unthinkable events (not least the station being one of the most heavily used departure points for Berlin's Jewish population, when they were 'deported'), the wreck was left for some time. Here it is in 1960, by kind agreement of allhails on Flickr, whose photostream is a fascinating thing indeed:
Ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof, West Berlin, c. 31 July 1960 by
allhails, on Flickr
There's some debate as to what happened, possibly involving the corrupt sale of the no-doubt valuable bricks contained in the above wreck, but here is what is still there, preserved as a memorial of sorts. Note the replica sculptures residing either sides of the clock there:
I'll finish this with another encouragement to visit allails' set here, and to look at his other sets from that city afterwards:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/allhails/s ... 461741786/
All the world seems in tune on a Spring afternoon, when we're poisoning pigeons in the park.