BERLIN IN THE COLD WAR
1959 TO 1966 AN INTERESTING STROLL THROUGH THE STREETS OF BOTH WEST AND EAST BERLIN
Books of photographs need to work hard to keep a reader’s attention. The danger is that you may find yourself dipping in repeatedly, opening the book at a random page to look at a few pictures and then putting it down again. Grabbing a reader and encouraging them to proceed through the book, as they would with a conventional narrative history, is something of a challenge.
Allan Hailstone hasn’t quite pulled off this tricky feat, but he has still produced a book that has the ability to both educate and fascinate.
Almost without exception this book presents two photographs, each with lengthy captions, on each page. There are several images that would have benefitted from more exposure (not in a photographic sense, but in the sense of having a whole page to themselves), and the danger of presenting them in such a small format is that detail can be missed. There are evocative images here – piles of rubble in East Berlin from bombs that fell 15 years earlier, propaganda posters covering a pillar, the site of Checkpoint Charlie before the Berlin Wall was constructed – and Hailstone’s captions are informative (although sometimes a little repetitive). Their impact, however, is often minimised by their size. This is a slim volume, and a few more pages to allow some of the best images to be shown on a larger scale, would have been welcome.
Hailstone divides his book into ‘Before the Wall’ and ‘After the Wall’ sections, and with most of the images being black and white, there is an ominous feel to the book as a whole. The first section is particularly interesting, as it covers an era largely forgotten, when it was possible to move from one world to another simply by walking across a street. The wall, and the aftermath of its fall, has dominated our thinking of the city for so long that we tend to forget Berlin was once divided without its help.
The lengthy captions go some way to providing information on what we are seeing, but an overall textual narrative would have helped to put the
“PARTICULARLY EFFECTIVE PHOTOS INCLUDE THE FAÇADE OF THE STALINALLEE, INTENDED TO BE A LUXURIOUSLY WIDE SHOPPING BOULEVARD BUT IN REALITY BARELY MASKING THE DEVASTATION BEHIND IT”
photographs into more of a context. A wellwritten introduction and short history of Berlin demonstrate that Hailstone would be perfectly capable of putting together such a narrative. As it is, the images tend to float in isolation, always having the ability to draw your attention but not always able to keep it.
Particularly effective photos include the façade of the Stalinallee, intended to be a luxuriously wide shopping boulevard but in reality barely masking the devastation behind it. Hailstone was also lucky enough to get the opportunity to snap Bobby Kennedy in 1964, and the quality of the image, as the unexpected motorcade glides past, is a testament to his ability with a camera.
There are also curious omissions. Hailstone mentions a rare jewel amid the brutalist architecture of East Berlin, the Kino International Cinema. Frustratingly, although we get two glimpses of parts of the cinema in separate photographs, we do not get a clear view of it.