An ostensibly endless front of gray fire walls lines up against a leaden sky. Here and there, crooked antennae stick out from rooftops as if trying to establish some type of contact. The mud of the wasteland in front of them is scored with tire tracks. In the foreground, there’s a street: asphalt skirted by a sidewalk. Yet however stringently these lines divide the picture, there’s little to see. The photograph is part of Berlin nach 45 (Berlin after 45), a series showing West Berlin exactly as empty and dreary as it was when the Berlin-born photographer Michael Schmidt made the body of work between 1978 and 1980. The war was still everywhere—both the Cold one and the war before it, with Nazi Germany against the Allied world. Though every picture he took in his hometown from the mid-1960s until the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, is intrinsically silent, this is no peaceful silence. Schmidt, born in October 1945, five months after the end of the war in Europe, shows West Berlin as a kind of wound—not picturesquely scarred, nor spectacularly gaping, but quietly festering like an infected sore.
After 1961, Berlin was a walled city, a concrete island divided into East and West, stuck amid the sealed-off GDR Berlin, I’d have thought you were joking. Back then, the atmosphere was a mixture of menace and apathy, constriction and gigantism, nonchalance and sadness. The wall sent shivers down my spine: sometimes stoically concrete, sometimes bursting with graffiti, it was a physically oppressive symbol of violence. For me, it represented not only my own parents fleeing the marauding Red Army at the end of World War II when they were kids but also my relatives stuck on the East side—traumas that the country still hasn’t processed. This city, I felt, was just craters and concrete. And yet, or perhaps of this, Berlin exerted a tremendous pull. Schmidt must have felt it too. The divided city was his life’s subject, the essence of everything he wanted his art to express.
