BRIGITTA ANTON
It was taken from the balcony of a friend's flat in East Berlin. It
shows a very old and crumbling building (pre-East Germany) surrounded
by other distinctly different buildings. On the other side (I should
really scan in the other picture as well) is a typical East German building,
a so-called Plattenbau ("Platte" meaning concrete square, and the outside
of East German apartment blocks were characterised by those squares).
The image shows a city in the process of transformation,
especially in the former East German part, where as yet the very old
neglected pre-East German buildings exist side by side with East German
architecture and newly-built high-tech "western"-style buildings. This
part of Berlin is changing nearly by the week, and nothing stays the
same. However, a lot of the old buildings (from the turn of the last
century) will be preserved (so they say), because the western part does
not have many of those left.
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