Based in Berlin since the late-1990s, Spanish-born artist El Bocho is well-known for his many colourful displays of street art throughout the city. I met with a friend M. in Prenzlauer Berg: first, at Maria Bonita for their grilled burrito; followed by a walk through the Kiez in easy pursuit of ice cream and coffee at Süßfein on a warm summer afternoon. What’s shown are examples of Bocho’s work we found within an area smaller than 10 city-blocks.
“Welcome Kitti’s”
“Love is hard to find.”
“Maikäfer flieg …” (May beetle in flight)
“waiting”
I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 23 June 2025. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.
In Berlin, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe is located between Brandenburger Tor and Potsdamer Platz. Completed in 2005 with a design by architect Peter Eisenman, the memorial site is in the former “death strip” and “no-man’s land” of the Berlin Wall, spread across 20-thousand square metres (about 5 acres) with over 2700 concrete stelae of varying heights, on ground that isn’t flat and rolls under your feet across the site.
An early summer morning, particularly on a Sunday, is good to have the entire site on my own. I don’t have to deal with questionables who treat the site as a personal playground. The millions who were targeted and killed deserve better memories, and frankly, a better choice of people.
Not only are the blocks set into the ground with different heights, the ground underneath rolls up and down, for a slow growing sense of unease. Even on a bright summer morning.
2025 marks the 20th anniversary of the memorial site.
I can’t help myself, but I’ll slip and spare a thought or two about “monoliths”.
The “hard” morning shadows seem to better illuminate any cracks in the concrete.
I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 22 June 2025. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.
As Nazi Germany turned Europe to ruin and ash, fighting on two fronts became infeasible: it was only a matter of time. When Allied troops began converging onto Berlin by late-April to early-May of 1945, the German military would be given zero options: the Allies demanded unconditional surrender.
One signing took place in France’s Reims on 7 May 1945 in the presence . On the night of 8-9 May, a second signing took place in the presence of Soviet military leaders in Karlshorst, about 11 km southeast from Berlin’s Reichstag parliament building. Both signings meant total surrender by Germany, and hostilities on all fronts in Europe had come to an end, which is why 8 May is remembered annually as V-E day or Victory in Europe day.
Today, the modest officers’ club building for the occasion of the second signing is now the Museum Berlin Karlshorst, which has seen plenty of changes from war’s end to the partition of Germany, to East Germany’s political ties to the Soviet Union, and to subsequent reunification of the 2 Germanys in 1990.
In line with evolving educational needs for the 21st-century, the museum commemorates not only the building and its grand hall, but also aspects of the 2nd World War specific to the Soviet Union: the prelude to war, massive losses of both soldiers and civilians, actions and abuses by the Soviet Red Army, trauma on survivors lingering from years to decades.
The museum is free of charge, and open to the public Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm.
The 2nd signing for Germany’s unconditional surrender took place here on the night of 8 May 1945.
Similar view 80 years later, in 2025.
If symbols are key, flying the Ukraine flag today is definitely one of them.
This memorial plaque appears on the exterior front wall: “On 8-9 May 1945, Germany signed their unconditional surrender within this building.”
8 to 9 May 1945.
The building’s grand hall, where the Karlshorst signing for Germany’s unconditional surrender took place.
At the head table (background-centre) with the Allied nations, from left to right, respectively: United Kingdom, Soviet Union, United States of America, and France.
With the shell of the Reichstag in flame and ruin, Red Army soldiers (lower centre) carry the Soviet flag towards the Reichstag in a picture dated 2 May 1945. As a big prize in conquering and securing Berlin, the Red Army had already raised the Soviet flag on the Reichstag on 30 April 1945. Photo correspondent Ivan Shagin.
Raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag is a famous photograph, but this photograph had been restaged for political and military purposes on 2 May 1945. Photo correspondent Yevgeniy Khaldey, bpk/Voller Ernst, Berlin
Children’s shoes from Majdanek concentration camp near Poland’s Lublin, 1944. An estimated 170-thousand people were murdered at Majdanek between 1942 and 1944, before Soviet forces liberated the camp on 23 July 1944. Soviets also secured various pieces of physical evidence, including these shoes. (Military Medicine Museum, St. Petersburg)
Near the building’s front entrance are a memorial and ex-Soviet army tank T-34 with two words painted in white: “за родину!” (for the homeland!)
I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 20 June 2025. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.
“Can something truly awful be depicted in a meaningful way?”
Art4All Thursday means the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery, NNG) is entirely free to the public from 4pm to 8pm. Residents and visitors in the masses stream into the gallery, because regular admission is between 16 and 20€.
Gerhard Richter is one of the featured artists on display at the NNG. Since the 1970s, the German artist has explored the limits of the painting process and physicality, but he like many of their generation has also challenged the ideas of producing meaning in German art in a post-Holocaust world. I saw some of his work this past winter at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, but here on display in Berlin, his 2014-2019 work called “Birkenau” is abstract, challenging, poignant, and provocative.
“Abstract images are fictional models because they visualise a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can infer.” (Gerhard Richter)
That’s another mirror at the end.
A forbidden image taken by a prisoner, attributed to Alberto Errera: Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944.
“Grauer Spiegel” / Grey mirror, by G. Richter, 2019, 4 parts.
“Birkenau”, by G. Richter, 2014, 4 parts.
The physical reflection invites the impossible, a (self-) examination asked by the artist of the viewer to consider the moral depths into which we will sink; whether survival welcomes or allows creative expression, and whether we still have it in ourselves to truly engage with the history of very difficult questions.
1 of the 4 parts. The abstraction is what keeps things “level”; see why below.
Neue Nationalgalerie.
I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 22 May 2025. I received neither request nor compensation for this content. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.
Here are a few sights of mine, after an afternoon in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district.
One Wall Mehringplatz (2014), by Shepard Fairey 🇺🇸.
Jewish Museum Berlin: In 1935, Regina Jonas became the first woman in the world to be ordained as rabbi in Germany.
Jewish Museum Berlin: In 2010, Alina Treiger became the first woman to be ordained as rabbi in Germany after the Holocaust.
DPA (Deutsche Presse-Agentur): the German Press Agency’s central editorial office. In front are statues of 3 politicians who saw and navigated big changes in 1989 and 1990.
George Bush 🇺🇸, Helmut Kohl 🇩🇪, and Mikhail Gorbachev 🇷🇺 : the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; and German reunification in 1990.
Checkpoint C: Friedrichstraße at Zimmerstrasse, facing south. Note the line of bricks across the street and the horizontal metal “plate” at lower right.
Checkpoint C: Friedrichstraße at Zimmerstrasse, facing north. Note the line of bricks across the street and the horizontal metal “plate” at lower left.
The line of bricks traces the former Berlin Wall (1961-1989).
Memorial to Peter Fechter who died at the Berlin Wall on 17 Aug 1962. Trying to escape into West Berlin, the 18 year old was shot by border guards, and bled to death alone in the border strip. The stele and paving with red-basalt circular-disk stone marks the spot where he died, on the East Berlin side, next to the Wall.
“Peter Fechter, 1944-1962: All he wanted was freedom.”
This street ran along the Berlin Wall from 1961 to 1990. Construction worker Peter Fechter was shot here trying to escape from East to West on 17 August 1962.
The “mobile & me” needed a boost. Phone got some charge, as I sat inside a bakery from one of the national chains, Kamps, with a Milchkaffee (latté) and Zitronenkuchen (lemon cake). Nothing “heavy”!
Stadtmitte U-Bahn station entrance “J”, in the middle of Friedrichstraße.
I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 19 May 2025. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.
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