The man is old, tired, exhausted. With unsteady gait, the umbrella as a support, he crosses the wasteland. "I can not find Potsdamer Platz," he mumbles. Wherever the old man looks, he sees emptiness, puddles, weeds. And a wall, over the years eagerly provided by sprayers with paint. "He can not be," he says with a sad look.
The Berlin Wall cut Potsdamer Platz into two parts during the Cold War. What the bombing raids in the Second World War had left of this once busiest place of the German capital, destroyed construction workers in the post-war period.
The old man named Homer is in Wim Wenders movie "The Sky over Berlin" from 1987 but looking for another time. "At Potsdamer Platz, there was the Café Josty", he remembers the legendary artists' meeting. "In the afternoon I talked and had a coffee." Now Homer barely dares his eyes. "It was a busy square, trams, buses with horses." Crowds of people poured out of the subway in the morning, and in the evening the house of the amusement palace Haus Vaterland was uninhibitedly feasted and danced. Nowhere else were the twenties as golden as here.
Collection Marc Walter / TASCHEN Verlag
Picturesque Ramsau near Berchtesgaden was portrayed in color.
Colorful in series - thanks to photochromes
National Socialism, war and demolition were soon to make a mess of Potsdamer Platz. Just like from many other cities, buildings and squares, which Germany had published under Kaiser Wilhelm II since the year 1900 as a kind of fairytale picture book. The cities were proud, the churches splendid, the people seemed satisfied.
Taschen-Verlag now offers a glimpse into this seemingly perfect past with its illustrated book "Germany around 1900", which depicts a magnificent panorama of this period. The clou: thanks to a revolutionary invention, the past Germany can be viewed in color. Long before color photography became commonplace, in 1888 the Swiss company Orell Füssli patented photochromic printing. Using this method, photographs could be printed in color in series - on pictures and postcards the world became colorful.
For Orell Füssli started a million dollar business. Worldwide, subsidiaries were created, the own photographers on the hunt for motives sent out and bought numerous negatives. In large print runs, the photochromes printed in color were subsequently sold until this time-consuming printing process was gradually replaced by color photography after the First World War.
Collection Marc Walter / TASCHEN Verlag
Excursionists strolled around 1900 in the Saxon Switzerland.
Close, but not perfect, the photochromes depict reality in color. Because only 14 colors are used in photochromic printing, the images appear somehow veiled. What only enhances the charisma of places like the often photographed dream castle Neuschwanstein in Bavaria.
Some 800 photochromes from Wilhelmine Germany are collected on over 600 pages in the heavy picture book "Germany around 1900". And presents a postcard idyll in the truest sense of the word. Rhine and Black Forest, Berlin and Munich, the hustle and bustle on the Baltic Sea beach and idyllic mountain landscapes - everything looks like a healty world.
Fairytale kingdom with blemishes
However, life did not look quite so perfect. Images from the working-class families crowded together in tenements in Berlin are missing, as well as from the Malochern on the Ruhr, where they struck coal in the sweat of her face and steel cooked.
But even the idyllic picture book of the photochromic world sometimes shows cracks on closer examination. An illustration shows exuberant spa guests on the island of Borkum. However, on the island not all people were welcome: "But whoever approaches you with flat feet, with crooked nose and hair, should not enjoy your beach, he must go out! He must go out!" Borkum-song ". On the island, Jews were undesirable, an expression of the rampant anti-Semitism in the Empire.
Thus, the elaborate band depicts a country in contradiction. On the one hand on the way to a modern industrial nation, on the other hand fraught with social conflicts. Proud of its technical achievements, but stuck in racist exclusion.
A country that was on the way to war and destruction. Also from the Potsdamer Platz only rubbish and ashes remained. "What is peace, that he does not inspire in the long run?" Homer muses in Wenders "Himmel über Berlin". Good question - after all, the war destroyed much of what can be admired in "Germany around 1900".