BGuthrie Photos: DC -- German-American Heritage Museum -- Exhibit: Fall of the Berlin Wall

DC -- German-American Heritage Museum -- Exhibit: Fall of the Berlin Wall:

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Description of Pictures: Join us for the Official Opening of "The Fall of the Berlin Wall" Photo Exhibit!
The distinguished San Francisco-based photographer Colin Campbell will unveil his photo exhibit at the GAHM. Called "The Fall of the Berlin Wall Seen From an American Perspective" this exhibit will take you back to the day the wall fell.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] BERLWP_141102_007.JPG	[2] BERLWP_141102_012.JPG	[3] BERLWP_141102_015.JPG
[4] BERLWP_141102_019.JPG	[5] BERLWP_141102_027.JPG	[6] BERLWP_141102_035.JPG
[7] BERLWP_141102_045.JPG	[8] BERLWP_141102_047.JPG	[9] BERLWP_141102_049.JPG
[10] BERLWP_141102_064.JPG	[11] BERLWP_141102_068.JPG	[12] BERLWP_141102_075.JPG
[13] BERLWP_141102_078.JPG	[14] BERLWP_141102_081.JPG	[15] BERLWP_141102_087.JPG
[16] BERLWP_141102_093.JPG	[17] BERLWP_141102_096.JPG	[18] BERLWP_141102_099.JPG
[19] BERLWP_141102_108.JPG	[20] BERLWP_141102_117.JPG	[21] BERLWP_141102_135.JPG
[22] BERLWP_141102_139.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. BERLWP_141102_012.JPG: A Hand Ungrasped! In this picture we're brought very close to the heart of the drama; a gouged our section of Wall, tugged towards West German soil, becomes an impromptu stage upon which a West German flag raiser, boldly balanced atop the falling slab, brandishes his country's colors, it is the blend of contrasting symmetries which invests the picture with such iconographic force, i.e. the fierce passionate upward thrust of West German hands, for instance, veins livid, juxtaposed against the limply hanging opened fists of the DDR soldiers; the jagged vertical texture of the broken-off cement viewed against the forbidding monumentality of the still-intact ledge, the listless chagrin on the faces of DDR troops shielding the partially blocked, but still recognizable, erstwhile glory of the Brandenburg Tor, the roar of the wall-dismantlers amidst the hapless silence of the brown-uniforms witnessing the literal enactment of their own demise. The apotheosis of the picture, however, lies perhaps in the lower right hand corner: there, the black sweatered youth offers his hand to an abashed & grinning East German soldier who, though smiling openly at the patent "absurdity" of his own personal predicament, still hangs back, refuses or is unable to reciprocate.
2. BERLWP_141102_075.JPG: Gorbachev's 'Nyet' Jubilant crowds throng against the already 'conquered wall', with a Huge slab of severed concrete hanging mid air: fruit of their joyful night's labor. They are amicably arguing with FDR police sent to "cosmetically" restore the breach so a more "ceremonial" opening can take place a few days hence. But the crucial character is off stage! He is none other than Mickhail Gorbachev, reigning head of the USSR. Unlike, Kruschev who sent Soviet troops roaring out of their garrisons in East Germany in 1953 to put down an uprising. "Gorby," when begged by then current GDR Pres., Erich Honecker, to come to his rescue, he said "nyet." "Those who hesitate swimming in the tide of history," he said, "may find themselves left behind!!" Result? The Soviet battalions tihs time remain confined to there barracks. East Berlin and East Germany were suddenly, proposterously, free!
3. BERLWP_141102_078.JPG: Nitchevo (What's To Say?) In this print a prio of DDR officers atop the Wall displays a range of possible responses to the appalling crackup of the social, political, and ideological landscape in which they've lived their whole lives unrelenting indoctrinated. On the left, hands on hips: a DDR trooper, with a mixture of disgust and disdain, registers the "undiscipline" property-destroying antics of that very West Berlin rabble whose decadent "capitalist" behavior obviously reinforces the stigmatizing stereotypes he's been educated to believe about them for years. At the far right, his colleague steps away, conscientiously documenting the "illegal" mischief of the demonstrators: he is part of that automatic (and sorcerer's apprentice like) "evidence"-gathering machinery which, in the DDR, under the hallucinatory devotions of the STASI, reached surreal proportions exceeding even the Kafka like standards set by the KGB... At the center, an ambiguous figure, arms imploringly upraised, -- in exasperation, in protest? -- revolver safely holstered, scrutinizes the milling throng. His open mouth implies words either already uttered or about to be spoken. But to what end? Plea for calm? Acknowledgement of guilt? Attempt at 11th hour "explanations"? Philosophic gesture of resignation? The very posture of this equivocal figure evokes a complex train of associations in which he may assume any number of imaginary roles: confessor, litigant, public defender, absolution seeker. The enigmatic force of his penitential image astride his now historically irrelevant barricade -- starkly outlined against a troubled sky & flanked by obviously unreconstructed comrades, serves somehow to crystallize those many anguishing and unfinished moral & political dilemmas which Berlin's artificial division over decades has only served to deflect, disguise, or perpetuate.
4. BERLWP_141102_096.JPG: West Berliner Confronts the DDR In this picture, a lone West German, head thrown back, feet firmly implanted opposite a painted peace graffiti, one hand, thumb to forefinger, raised in the classic debater's stance, seems to be trying in vain to solicit dialogue from the voiceless brown-clad troops strung out in dumbstruck silence along the Wall. In his obvious vulnerability, and particularly in the contrast between his solitary figure and the vestigial hulk of the graffiti-scarred Wall bearing its frieze of paralyzed guardians -- he conjures up another historically indelible image: the audacious unarmed youth, taunting, and (temporarily) baffling the impotently side-to-side swerving tank in Tianamen Square... Twenty or thirty feet is all that separates this supplicating figure from his potential audience. Yet there are nearly five decades of cold war pathology embedded in that short span. And though the wall's physical structure will soon be pulverized by bulldozers, wrecking balls, cranes and pneumatic hammers, its toxic legacy -- comprising the damnation of entire societies amidst fusillades of bitter ideological crossfire, and the manufacture of whole generations of political pariahs and scapegoats, as well as the actual flesh-and-blood murder, in plain daylight, of a martyr's rollcall of would-be escapees -- may well resonate bitterly in the psyches of Germans, East and West, for years to come.
5. BERLWP_141102_099.JPG: Not with a Bang But a Whimper! In this scene, we're faced with vividly contrasting images: below, an urgent crush of photographers and voyeurs, thrusting themselves at the increasing blizzard of pock-marked holes, chips & slashes marking the already "defeated" Wall. On top, a dispirited group of listless, rag-doll (soon to be) ex GDR border guards, their former authority absent, their fingers locked despairingly behind their backs. The scene evokes a landmark poem of 1925, "The Hollow Men" by TS Eliot, in which the poet uncannily intuits the political freak shows ahead of us, the rise of anticipated "True-Believer" nations; ruled by repellent creatures, blabbering solemn clouds of jabberwocky nonsense in a surreal future in which he wanted no part. A cautionary tale of a poem where the poet also prophesied with a shudder; how he thought such regimes would probably "implode." "This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper!" TS Eliot
6. BERLWP_141102_117.JPG: Breakthrough! After 12 back-breaking hours, the sledgehammer brigade finally manages to break off a piece of the wall and is now about to shove it into DDR territory. This picture, in fact, incarnates one of those implausible happy endings to one of History's periodic Morality Plays which continually mark the folklore of multiple diverse societies and epochs. All one has to do is affix a name to this print: Berlin -- and instantly a sorrowful scroll -- an apocalyptic newsreel -- of past images unwinds in the mind: i.e. Hitler's bunker, trashed and burning amidst desolate vistas of rubble & ruin, the first uneasy 4 power occupation patrols; the first bullying attempts at isolating the population, initial ploys in the early salvos of the Cold War; Stalin's blockade and the bravura of the airlift; the overnight ghetto-ization of the city, the terrible carnage of the failed '56 uprising, Kennedy's "Ich bin Ein Berliner" speech, Le Carre's beatification of Berlin as the grad school of the spying trades. Finally, Gorbachev's stunning ascension and his all but miraculous renunciation of Empire, leading ultimately to the climactic melodrama witnessed in this photograph.... More, however, seems to be evoked by the details of this image than mere "political" context. An uncanny sacramental air emanates from it. Notice, for instance, the "candelabra" of human hands straining in an aspiring arc against the brutish bulk of the lifeless cement. Dwell for a while on the upward thrust of the arms, the poignancy of the semi-circle of uncovered heads: it all suggests a kind of open air victory mass, a spontaneous public rite celebrating not only those whose freedom is imminent but the pathos of inextinguishable human aspiration itself -- the fragility of mere flesh, say, triumphing over what 19th century iconoclasts used to call the tyranny of the "souless" machine, later day equivalent of Blake's "black satanic mills." Each of these images carries its own voiceless commentary or soundtrack. But in the case of the photograph under scrutiny, the text which comes inexorably to mind was once spoken by the greatest black orator of the age, standing in front of a million people before the Washington Monument in 1964, & repeating the words of the great spiritual whose words had become a tocsin not only for him but for millions of others, East AND West, whose lives he was to destined to inspire, (as well as those whose delayed liberations, not yet realized, the photograph seems to warn, cannot forever be postponed or denied.) "Free at last, free at last, great Godalmighty, free at last!"
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