All you could hear was that ching-ching-ching-ching on concrete.
You know, everybody was doing it.
Everybody was trying to get a piece of the wall.
[Developing News]
My name is Pierre Alozie.
I’m a photojournalist, and I’m here to talk about
photos taken at the fall of the Berlin Wall.
So this is actually a few hours before the breach of the wall
and the wall fell.
There was a kind of excitement in the air,
so this feeling of anticipation, you know, something is changing.
And you can see that this is actually West Berliners,
just because of how they’re dressed—
hair cut, their styling, and stuff like that.
The couple, they are, I think...
I mean, she does look surprised and slightly worried.
He’s protective towards her.
It almost feels like he's got his arm around her
and kind of holding her so that she doesn’t fall
backwards into East Berlin.
The boy in the middle, he’s also in that kind of
not quite sure what’s going to happen kind of thing.
There’s a guy here hammering.
Hammering to get his piece of the wall.
All you could hear was that ching-ching-ching-ching on concrete,
and they were going totally nuts.
You know, everybody was doing it.
Everybody was trying to get a piece of the wall.
Yeah, this is a long lens.
It was darkness, and I had to push the film in the darkroom.
The photo was taken with whatever means I had available.
I don’t use flash. Flash, for me, was kind of artificial.
I mean, I just wanted to kind of get in, get out.
Berlin was divided into two by the wall in 1961.
On one hand, there was the DDR, the German Democratic Republic.
They considered themselves to be anti-fascist,
socialist, in a kind of a social collective way,
and also dictatorial because it was a dictatorship.
And then you’ve got the West, which is capitalist,
which is ultra-liberal, which is freedom of speech,
freedom of movement.
So West Berlin was basically an enclave in the Eastern Bloc.
By the beginning of ’88, East Germans started to demonstrate.
Then on the west side,
there was a kind of a similar movement of sympathy, of support.
And then you started to get people coming to the Berlin Wall.
Until eventually the wall fell.
On the left hand side, you have an older lady.
So she must have been born just after the Second World War,
so has probably seen what has happened in West Berlin
and East Berlin and seen the division.
And there is in her expression, there’s a kind of like
satisfaction, anticipation.
There’s something going on there.
There’s almost a recognition of what's going on.
So this photo actually is a few months after
the fall of the Berlin Wall,
so we’re now in 1990.
So there’s still East German guards controlling access into East Berlin.
All these people here are East Germans or East Berliners.
And you can actually see the clothes that they're wearing,
the hats, the trench coat,
this is very old-school.
And they’re queuing to get back into East Berlin.
In the background, you can still see one of the watchtowers.
And then the whole space is the no man's land.
And the no man's land, of course, was mined.
And then on the East Berlin side,
the wall starts over here.
After 30 years now, I mean, it’s still not resolved,
the whole East-West conundrum.
The “Ossis,” as they used to call the people from the east,
are still feeling that they are disadvantaged
vis-à-vis to the West German, the “Wessis,”
which is why you have Pegida and the anti-EU, anti-immigration.
This is called
It was shot in January 1990.
We have the Bundestag.
You’ve got some East Berlin buildings on the right hand side
and you’ve got the wall dividing the two.
In the frame of the picture,
I kind of have different figures, like this lady.
I like the fact that she’s kind of slipping out of the frame.
There's also the whole idea of
a photographer actually photographing the wall.
But primarily, it’s about her.
She's standing on a pile of rubble of what was
the wall in front of her.
Not only is she standing on the wall
and kind of representing the divide between the two Berlins,
but also she’s representing the hope, not only for Germany,
but also for the whole Eastern Bloc, basically.
The Cold War is over
and people will be able to live a happier and better life.