B1

Along the B1 Highway through Berlin

Aenne Burghardt, Ekkehart Keintzel, André Kirchner, Andreas Muhs, Peter Oehlmann, Cordia Schlegelmilch, Jörg Schmiedekind, Wolf Jobst Sieder, Peter Thieme, Volker Wartmann, Arndt Weider, Jochen Wermann

A section of the B1 highway, a major artery that originally connected Königsberg with Aachen, leads through Berlin, from Mahlsdorf in the east to the Glienicke Bridge in the southwest. The route passes through numerous historically significant sites that have left their indelible mark on Berlin's cityscape. These places make twentieth-century German history legible and tangible – from the November Revolution of 1918 to the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era, the Second World War, the post-war years, and the division of Berlin to Reunification following the fall of the Wall. The city’s disparate history, along with all its upheavals and changes, is manifested in the urban areas and architecture located along the B1, which can be experienced and understood as a sequence of exhibited objects.

Twelve photographers from the Berliner Gesprächsrunde zur Stadtfotografie (Berlin Round Table on Urban Photography) offer their personal perceptions of and thoughts about these places, which are anchored in the present but never allow their history to be forgotten.