Less than twenty years after the end of the Second World War, a new shadow seemed to be falling over the peace Europe was seeking to rebuild. The shadow of a wall.
During the night of 12–13 August 1961, Berlin was divided into East and West by the Berlin Wall, the best-known symbol of the Cold War. Initially, it was not a solid wall, but a border marked out by barbed wire, concrete blocks, and patrolling soldiers.
Streets and homes were abruptly cut in half. Families, lovers, friends and neighbors were divided by a boundary that had once been invisible, and that became more real day by day.
This extraordinary situation, a city that was being broken in two brick by brick, was photographed by four Magnum photographers: Burt Glinn, René Burri, Leonard Freed and Thomas Hoepker. True to the agency’s approach, their images convey both the historical fact and the lived experience of Berliners. Some scenes feel almost surreal. We see people standing on railings or on mounds of sand, looking over a wall that is only half-built, waving from a distance to friends and relatives they could still embrace just days earlier. Some peer through gaps between the concrete blocks. In another image, a bricklayer walls up a window in a house that is about to become part of the barrier. Groups of soldiers watch each other from just a few meters away.
These unsettling photographs also bear witness to a reality that shaped life in Berlin from then until 1989, only a few decades ago.
The Berlin Wall marks the end of our journey, which has made us witnesses to the conflicts of the Second World War, the rebuilding that followed, and the new fears of the post-war world. Witnesses not only to events, but to the lives of people who faced moments of anguish and moments of hope, and who have reached us through the lens of Magnum Photos.
Thank you for accompanying us on this journey.
As you move through the exhibition, the question we asked at the beginning still echoes, and in the world we live in, it feels more current than ever.
Back to Peace?
Is a return to peace possible?
