These next four are for my own edification, really. Nothing "artistic" about these. I first visited (West) Germany in July, 1988. (West) Berlin was tops on my list; I wanted to see Communism and Totalitarianism as close as I could. I returned in July, 2006 almost exactly 18 years after my first visit to see what had changed.

This was taken at Wilhelmstrasse looking east along what is now Niederkirchnerstrasse, which at this time was in No Man's Land directly on the other side of the Wall. This location is the site of the Prinzalbrecht Hotel, the SS headquarters. It had been bombed flat at the end of the war; there was just a vacant lot there then with a small museum dedicated to the memory of all those that had suffered under the SS's interogations in the basement of the building. I was standing on a large wooden platform that had been erected to allow people to look over the Wall and into East Berlin.

It was a bleak place.