This is a belated plug for Dave Rimmer's feature [2] on the Ostzeit photography exhibition in Berlin that we published last week. It's a display of photographs from the former East Germany, but Dave makes an interesting point at the end of his piece: we think of the East as a "vanished" world -- and what about West Berlin? Geographically isolated during the cold war, it was never really part of "the west" as such. The former East Berlin is now a fashionable tourist destination and memories of life under communism have been evoked in films such as Goodbye Lenin [3] and The Lives of Others [4]. But, writes Dave, "nobody has bothered to ask west Berliners what they think about the past". He continues:

Watching everything move east into the smartened-up new city centre, while their side of town becomes ever tattier and less fashionable, the west Berliners . . . have become the forgotten term in Berlin's perennially vexed equation.

Here's video footage of a crossing from east to west in 1990, after the wall had come down, but when the city was still divided: