Pictures of a weird Berlin Wall corner
At the bottom of this little website you will find 3 weird Berlin Wall pictures. They must have been taken early after Nov.9th 1989. I don't know the source, found them some 10+ years ago in a Berlin Wall Archive on the net. Cannot find them today (2010), maybe that has gone offline. I don't want to harm copyrights, so if anybody knows the source please drop me a note - Wolfgang.Pietsch@spd-online.de
First have a look on 2 maps describing the situation, then read the following text. The maps are repeated below for convenient scrolling close to the pictures. On the maps, West-Berlin is on the Left, Potsdam on the Right.
Location is at Stubenrauchstraße, most part belonging to Potsdam-Babelsberg but one house was in West-Berlin. The border situation today is still the same. At #25 you will still find the old borderstone marking the exact corner inside(!) their garden. So the house is in Berlin and the fence to the street is in Potsdam. Study the 1:1000 map and you'll see, a little part of the house corner (from street view on the left) is cut by the border. Today, this is the border between Federal States of Berlin and Brandenburg. Now imagine the weird East German border protection regime before 1989. The street couldn't be closed cause the Potsdam part was an inhabited although secured border area, only inhabitants and specially approved persons were allowed to enter, no guests from the west there. Even though these people were considered "reliable", a minimum strongly secured area had to be set up at that corner. Those 2 pictures were taken from the roof of the Potsdam school on the opposite side of the street. Let's have again a look on the detailed maps (courtesy of Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung Berlin - FIS Broker) - Orientation: On upper map, lower right area is Griebnitzsee, which on the very lower right belongs to Berlin again. Map is flipped vertically if you're used to have N on top.
Make a nice excursion today and compare the situation with what you see below. Not far away from S-Bahn station Griebnitzsee. Third picture is a view from the street corner, where the divided part of Stubenrauchstraße turns into Potsdam.
