Berlin: Two worlds in one city

After I read the article "Glimpse into the East" written by my teammate F e d e r i c o I started to think about Berlin, the Cold War and the meaning of the Berlin Wall. The size of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was, in my opinion, the biggest in history. Not only because of the geographical coverage that was indeed global, from Latin America to Vietnam, from Eastern Europe to Zaire and from the planet earth into the outer space.

But the interesting thing is that during this conflict we had not only wars all over the world and an Space Race, we also had two ways of living, thinking and organizing societies that made life of common people, like you and me absolutely different depending in which half of the world you where living in.

So, the world was divided into two, a family from Canada or Spain had a way of life absolutely different from a family from China or Poland. But in all these examples and almost in every case your entire country and probably your countries region was all in the same "half" of the world, with this similar way of living, thinking, studying, working and dreaming about the future.

But Berlin was an exception, Berlin was the last border of this two worlds, Berlin was a city where this different societies had to live knowing that only a few streets away in any family apartment a different system was running.

This explanation is an introduction I wanted to make to a picture a took during my 2006 trip to Berlin. This photo was taken with my Konica Minolta Z6 camera using the full power of the 420mm build in zoom. The effect I wanted on the image was to show how close this two worlds were from each-other. You can see in the picture two different towers. The one on the left is the Berlin TV tower, the highest exponent of the socialism progress, it was built in 1969 as a present to the German Democratic Republic in its twentieth anniversary. The other one is the Berlin Victory column located in the heart of West Berlin, inaugurated in 1873.

This picture show us something clearly, citizens from both sides of the wall could actually see the other half of the planet, they could listen what was going on in the "rest of the world". I think this is why the Berlin Wall is an outstanding symbol of the conflict that divided the planet and as I said before, the outer space into two halves for four decades.