Show Navigation

Search Results

Refine Search
Match all words
Match any word
Prints
Personal Use
Royalty-Free
Rights-Managed
(leave unchecked to
search all images)
{ 12 images found }

Loading ()...

  • Displayed on a table at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, peaked caps of the former East German (DDR in German) border police are on sale in orderly rows for the sake of tourists to this German city. The border troops of the German Democratic Republic (Grenztruppen), were a military force of the GDR and the primary force guarding the Berlin Wall and the border between East and West Germany. The Border Troops numbered at their peak approximately 47,000 troops and other than the Soviet Union, no other Warsaw Pact country had such a large border guard force. In all, 1,065 persons were killed along the GDR's frontiers and coastline, often by the border guards. The East Germany state existed from 7 October 1949 until 3 October 1990 and was a potent symbol of a divided Europe during the Cold War.
    DDR_travel02-06_1990_1.jpg
  • On the edge of an old Soviet parade ground, peeling murals show an instruction mural for guarding prison camps seen in this army boot camp in the former East German peninsular called Halbinsel Wustrow near Rostock. For the benefit of recruits or as reminders of Soviet discipline, the picture shows a soldier standing at the barbed wire of a generic Gulag holding his AK-47 weapon and dressed in fur hat and uniform from that era. Perhaps those training here were eventually to guard political prisoners though it is a reminder of a fallen ideology. Wustrow was once a WW2 German anti-aircraft artillery position then housed civilian refugees before the eventual Soviet occupation of the former DDR during the Cold War, up until 1990 and the fall of communism and the Berlin Wall. The camp was ransacked and all its assets stripped before its desertion that summer.
    russian_wustrow03-16-06_1990.jpg
  • On the edge of an old Soviet parade ground, peeling murals show the physical style of Russian marching techniques seen in this army boot camp in the former East German peninsular called Halbinsel Wustrow near Rostock. For the benefit of recruits or as a reminder of Soviet discipline, the picture shows soldiers marching in that unmistakable goose-stepping style reminiscent of the Nazi era, with high forward kicks and a strenuous arm movement to the chest as seen in iconic May Day celebrations in Red Square. Wustrow was once a WW2 German anti-aircraft artillery position then housed civilian refugees before the eventual Soviet occupation of the former DDR during the Cold War, up until 1990 and the fall of communism and the Berlin Wall. The camp was ransacked and all its assets stripped before its desertion that summer and is a reminder of a fallen ideology
    russian_wustrow01-16-06_1990.jpg
  • Children play in a desolate street in the town of Nova Huta. Amid the filthy walls of their tenement building home and of the grim, car less street beyond, two older children play in their doorway while younger friends peer from around a corner. It is horribly depressing and unhealthy place to grow up and these children are pale and yet seem happy, with smiles on their faces. The famous steel works can be seen at the end of the street. After the war, Stalin decided to build an ideological communist fantasy just outside Krakow: a model town and immense steelworks of the future. The steelworks was named after Lenin and the town would be called Nova Huta. At its peak, 27,000 people worked at the Lenin Steelworks. But Solidarity grew strong forcing strikes over pay and recognition over their union. Today, it is an economic and ecological disaster area.
    poland_poverty-20-06-1990.jpg
  • A coal delivery man deposits chunks of brown coal into the cellar via a conveyor belt for an elderly lady who stands outside in the bitter cold wearing only a housecoat this grim day. Her slippers can be seen standing among fallen briquettes that have dropped on to the wet cobbled street as the man oversees the delivery from a truck that has backed on to the pavement near a junction. A passing Trabant car rattles up the hill past a mother who pauses to ensure a safe crossing for her baby. Aue is a mining town in the Ore Mountains known for its copper, titanium, and kaolinite. The town was a machine-building and cutlery manufacturing centre in the East German era with a population of roughly 18,000 inhabitants. It was the administrative seat of the former district of Aue-Schwarzenberg in Saxony and part of the Erzgebirgskreis since August 2008..
    DDR_travel04-06_1990_1.jpg
  • Lying horizontal in a Budapest scrap yard are two Communist-era statues that were toppled along with the fall of the Hungarian Socialist state in March 1990. In the foreground is the statue of the once-hated Hungarian local Communist Ferenc Munnich who participated in the 1956 Hungarian revolution, then a member of the ‘Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Government’, the Workers’ Militia and then defence minister and earning himself the Order of Lenin in 1967. After Hungary’s transition to a democracy, he has been dumped horizontally on a wooden frame, sliced off its original plinth at the feet and painted red, awaiting its fate. In fact this statue is now located in the theme park called Szoborpark (Statue Park) in the south of the city where he shares a political tourist landscape of 42 pieces of art from the Communist era between 1945 and 1989.
    communist_statue-13-06-1990_1.jpg
  • A young skateboarder leaps into the air beneath the huge memorial to the German Communist leader Ernst Thalmann, the leader of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during much of the Weimar Republic. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 and held in solitary confinement for eleven years, before being shot in Buchenwald on Adolf Hitler's orders in 1944. The Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation, consisting of the Young Pioneers and the Thälmann Pioneers, was a youth scouting-styled organisation of schoolchildren aged 6 to 14, in East Germany. Its motto was" "Für Frieden und Sozialismus seid bereit – Immer bereit" ("For peace and socialism be ready - always ready") but the Pioneers were disbanded in 1989 after early protests here in Leipzig at the same time as the Berlin Wall and the Socialist state's fall.
    DDR_travel05-06_1990_1.jpg
  • A new Trabant car shell is lifted by forklift from a truck at the East German auto maker VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau in Zwickau, Saxony.  A worker carefully manoeuvres the unfinished bodywork into a crate where other vehicles await completion on the production line. The Trabant was the most common vehicle in East Germany - Like the Beetle in the West, its Peoples' Car with a 595 cc, two-cylinder air-cooled engine. It had space for four, was compact, light and durable with its distinctive body shape constructed from Duroplast panels attached to a galvanized steel shell. It was in production without any significant changes for about 34 years, becoming a symbol for the cheap, cheerful and polluting possessions for Communist Europeans. When the Berlin Wall eventually fell, Trabants coughed and spluttered onto West German roads for the first time
    DDR_travel03-06_1990_1.jpg
  • Detail of a rusty Wartburg 312 car standing at the kerbside in an eastern Berlin district. A sticker with the letters DDR as the German Democratic Republic (DDR in German and GDR in English) as East Germany was called during the Cold War. Any car was a highly-prized possession when ownership of luxury goods like vehicles aroused suspicion for other than Communist Party officials. This car may have been someone of rank or influence. The GDR was a self-declared socialist state, referred to in the West as a "communist state" in the Soviet Sector of occupied Germany created after the second world war and partitioned when DDR leaders built the Berlin Wall that eventually segregated Germany and Europe. The East Germany state existed from 7 October 1949 until 3 October 1990 and was a potent symbol of a divided Europe during the Cold War.
    DDR_travel01-06_1990_1.jpg
  • A detail from the oversized artwork entitled Brotherhood Kiss (Bruderkuss) by Dmitry Vrubel that once adorned a section of the notorious Berlin Wall in western Germany Russian. Two seemingly gay men are kissing on the lips but this is one of the most famous paintings – a symbol of a divided Europe during the Cold War. It shows Communist Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev kissing his East German (DDR) counterpart Erich Honecker, which was ultimately copied on to coffee cups and T-shirts across the world before being destroyed by the authorities. The artist was angry but he says he will paint a new image which was derived from a photograph of the two leaders taken 1979 but became a potent symbol of Communism's corruption and ultimate failure.
    berlin_wall_kiss-04-11-1990_1.jpg
  • On the edge of an old Soviet parade ground, peeling murals show the physical style of Russian marching techniques seen in this army boot camp in the former East German peninsular called Halbinsel Wustrow near Rostock. For the benefit of recruits or as reminders of Soviet discipline, the picture shows a soldier marching in that unmistakable goose-stepping style reminiscent of the Nazi era, with high forward kicks and a strenuous arm movement to the chest as seen in iconic May Day celebrations in Red Square. Wustrow was once a WW2 German anti-aircraft artillery position then housed civilian refugees before the eventual Soviet occupation of the former DDR during the Cold War, up until 1990 and the fall of communism and the Berlin Wall. The camp was ransacked and all its assets stripped before its desertion that summer and is a reminder of a fallen ideology
    russian_wustrow02-16-06_1990.jpg
  • Sitting among others in long grass a middle-class lady reads the high-circulation Daily Mail newspaper during a lunchtime break at the Chelsea Flower Show, in London England. The front page headline reads 'Icy Blast from the Kremlin' in an echo from the darkest days of the Cold War, when western media fuelled the insatiable appetite for propaganda. But this scene is from May 1989 before the fall of the Berlin Wall and when the eastern states of the Warsaw Pact were still ruled by their Communist masters. Visitors to this annual horticultural event either sit in the cool shade or like this woman who appears comfortable cross-legged in sandals and a summer dress, stays under the hot mid-day sun with her tabloid format paper spread and with her possessions kept in a shoulder bag.
    chelsea_lady05-26-1989_1.jpg
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
x

In Pictures

  • About
  • Contact
  • Join In Pictures
  • Archive
    • All Galleries
    • Search
    • Cart
    • Lightbox
    • Client Area