Description

The Berlin Wall – a heavily guarded concrete barrier that physically and ideologically divided the city – was built in 1961. Leonard Freed documented the wall being erected, as well as the experiences of those living on its western side in the following years as Germany came to terms with being a nation divided. Freed particularly focused upon the comparatively freewheeling youth in the West – perhaps the best-known of those images being this, taken in Berlin’s Tiergarten in 1965. The photographer’s daughter, Elke Freed, recalled the occasion: “We were in the Tiergarten park, my parents and I, there were all these people just hanging out in there: couples kissing, mixing, joking around. Berlin in the 1960s. The crossing of the German and Turkish cultures – sexual revolution – Germans mixing with other cultures following World War II.”

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