The Berlin Wall was a guarded concrete barrier that divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989. It encircled West Berlin, separating it from East German territory. Construction of the wall was commenced by the German Democratic Republic on 13 August 1961. The Wall cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany, including East Berlin. It included guard towers placed along large concrete walls, accompanied by a wide area that contained anti-vehicle trenches, beds of nails and other defenses.
Potsdamer Platz is a public square and traffic intersection in the center of Berlin, Germany, lying about 1 km (1,100 yd) south of the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, and close to the southeast corner of the Tiergarten park. It is named after the city of Potsdam, some 25 km (16 mi) to the south west, and marks the point where the old road from Potsdam passed through the city wall of Berlin at the Potsdam Gate. After developing within the space of little over a century from an intersection of rural thoroughfares into the most bustling traffic intersection in Europe, it was totally destroyed during World War II and then left desolate during the Cold War era when the Berlin Wall bisected its former location. Since German reunification, Potsdamer Platz has been the site of major redevelopment projects.
U1 is a line on the Berlin U-Bahn, which is 8.8 kilometres (5.5 mi) long and has 13 stations. Its traditional line designation was BII. It runs east–west and its eastern terminus is Warschauer Straße S-Bahn station where it connects to the Schlesische Bahn. From there it runs through Kreuzberg via Gleisdreieck and Wittenbergplatz on to the Kurfürstendamm.
U2 is a line of the Berlin U-Bahn. The U2 line starts at Pankow S-Bahn station, runs through the eastern city centre (Alexanderplatz) to Potsdamer Platz, the western city centre and finally to the Ruhleben terminal station.
The M-Bahn or Magnetbahn was an elevated Maglev train line operating in Berlin, Germany, experimentally from 1984 and in passenger operation from 1989 to 1991. The line was 1.6 kilometres (1 mi) in length, and featured three stations, two of which were newly constructed. Presumed to be the future of rail transit in Berlin, the line was built to fill a gap in the West Berlin public transport network created by the construction of the Berlin Wall. It was rendered redundant by the reunification of Berlin and was closed to enable reconstruction of the U2 line.
Thierry Noir is a French artist and muralist based in Berlin. He is considered the first artist to paint the Berlin Wall in the 1980s. He created brightly-colored paintings across large spans of the Berlin Wall and some of these original paintings can still be seen on surviving segments of the Wall in art collections and on the East Side Gallery. Noir's work and style are now considered iconic, and Noir is also regarded as one of the forerunners of the street art movement as a whole. He continues to create murals worldwide in cities including London, Los Angeles, and Sydney.
The Potsdamer Bahnhof is a former railway terminus in Berlin, Germany. It was the first railway station in Berlin, opening in 1838. It was located at Potsdamer Platz, about 1 km south of the Brandenburg Gate, and kick-started the transformation of Potsdamer Platz from an area of quiet villas near the south-east corner of the Tiergarten park into the bustling focal point that it eventually became. For more than a century it was the terminus for long-distance and suburban trains. Also located at this spot were underground stations on the Berlin U-Bahn and S-Bahn, and today's new underground Regionalbahnhof, known as Bahnhof Potsdamer Platz, while the short-lived M-Bahn crossed the site of the former terminus.
The Berlin border crossings were border crossings created as a result of the post-World War II division of Germany. Prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, travel between the Eastern and Western sectors of Berlin was completely uncontrolled, although restrictions were increasingly introduced by the Soviet and East German authorities at major crossings between the sectors. This free access, especially after the closure of the Inner German border, allowed the Eastern Bloc emigration and defection to occur. East German officials, humiliated by this mass defection, subsequently chose to erect the Berlin Wall in order to prevent residents from leaving East Germany.
The Anhalter Bahnhof is a former railway terminus in Berlin, Germany, approximately 600 m (2,000 ft) southeast of Potsdamer Platz. Once one of Berlin's most important railway stations, it was severely damaged in World War II, and finally closed for traffic in 1952, when the GDR-owned Deutsche Reichsbahn rerouted all railway traffic between Berlin and places in the GDR avoiding the West Berlin area. The station's name lives on in the Berlin S-Bahn station of the same name, opened in October 1939 as part of the North-South S-Bahn link.
Berlin Potsdamer Platz is a railway station in Berlin. It is completely underground and situated under Potsdamer Platz in central Berlin. Regional and S-Bahn services call at the station, and it is also served by U-Bahn line U2.
Horst Walter was a contemporary German artist.
The North–South S-Bahn Tunnel is the central section of the North–South transversal Berlin S-Bahn connection crossing the city centre. It is not to be confused with the Tunnel Nord–Süd Fernbahn, the central tunnel part of the North–South main line used by intercity and regional trains. The S-Bahn North–South line encompasses the route from Bornholmer Straße and Gesundbrunnen via Friedrichstraße and Anhalter Bahnhof to Papestraße and Schöneberg.
The Wannsee Railway is a suburban railway in Berlin running from Potsdamer Platz via the Ring line station of Schöneberg to Wannsee station on Großer Wannsee, a lake after which it is named. Today it is a section of the Berlin S-Bahn line S1.
The Columbushaus was a nine-storey modernist office and shopping building in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, designed by Erich Mendelsohn and completed in 1932. It was an icon of progressive architecture which passed relatively unscathed through World War II but was gutted by fire in the June 1953 uprising in East Germany. The ruin was subsequently razed in 1957 because it stood in the border strip; the site where the structure once stood was occupied by activists shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall.
The Denots Crew (TDC) is a group of international Street artists, musicians and dancer. Their artwork and music productions pushed Berlin Hip-Hop- and Graffiti History since 1982 to europes main cities of today.
The Berlin Wall Monument in Chicago is an exhibit on display at the Western Brown Line CTA station. The monument contains a large segment of the Berlin Wall and a plaque describing its dedication to the city. The Berlin Wall represented one of the great political, economic, and ideological divides of the twentieth century between two major powers: the United States and the Soviet Union.
The Berlin U-Bahn originated in 1880 with Werner Siemens' idea to build an urban railway in Berlin. During the nine years after the German Empire was founded, the city's population grew by over one-third and traffic problems increased. In 1896, Siemens & Halske began to construct the first stretch of overhead railway. On 1 April 1897, the company began construction of an electric underground railway. The Berliner Verkehrs Aktiengesellschaft (BVG) was formed in 1928, and took over further construction and operation of the network. In 1938, the company was renamed Berlin Transport Company; the original acronym, however, remained. Since 1994, the BVG has been a public company.
Arwed Messmer is a German photographer and artist, based in Berlin. His work primarily uses recontextualised vernacular photographs of recent historical events, found in German state archives, in order to pose questions about photography. He mainly produces books of this work, often with Annett Gröschner on the time of a divided Germany, but also exhibits it.
The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November, 1989, during the Peaceful Revolution, was a pivotal event in world history which marked the falling of the Iron Curtain and one of the series of events that started the fall of communism in Eastern and Central Europe, preceded by the Solidarity Movement in Poland. The fall of the inner German border took place shortly afterwards. An end to the Cold War was declared at the Malta Summit three weeks later and the German reunification took place in October the following year.
