Berlin is, on the one hand, a city bursting with creativity and freedom—alive with artists, rebels, and dreamers. But beneath that energy, the memory of tyranny, destruction, death, power madness, and division lingers, trapped within just a few square kilometers. Between these extremes live the Berliners: from the West, from the East, migrants from everywhere, each raised within different regimes, religions, and social realities. They make their homes in neighborhoods like Mitte, Charlottenburg, Wedding, Kreuzberg, Prenzlauer Berg, Neukölln, and Friedrichshain—a patchwork of lives shaped by division and change.
My everyday photo project can’t do justice to this city—its layers, its contradictions. Instead of a sweeping series, there’s only one photo for each day. Even so, for me, it meant a return: I first set foot in Berlin in 1990. The Wall had only fallen six months earlier, and the city was just beginning to realize what had happened. The border itself was gone, but the rift between East and West ran deeper than ever—standards of living worlds apart, political views clashing, one side feeling like winners, the other side lost in defeat. Painfully, even twenty-four years later, the distance between us seems just as great.
Still, a week in Berlin was good for us. We stayed in an apartment on the west side of Mitte, near the Brandenburg Gate—no need to rush and check off every highlight, just like on our journey here. On the way, we stopped at Checkpoint Alpha, once the border crossing between the GDR and FRG. In 1990, strict border controls stopped us for over an hour—now, you can just pause for a curry sausage and walk among the remnants of a vanished division. The city draws you in; I know we’ll always come back.
Wouter Brandsma 