Berlin Wonderland: Wild Years Revisited, 1990–1996

Yes, there really was a time before Berlin became a city of the so-called Kreativitätsindustrie. It is almost forgotten now, given the chic facades that line Mitte’s streets in 2014. But in the years right after the Wall came down in 1989, all kinds of subcultures bloomed in the abandoned ruins and along the streets where the border had divided the city into East and West.

Berlin Wonderland: Wild Years Revisited, 1990–1996 gathers more than two hundred black and white images across some 240 pages, and shows just how much Mitte has changed since then. Squats with crooked stovepipes; bars built into ground floors that had no doors; gardens growing in the cracks of empty buildings; parties that began at midnight in places that, on paper, did not exist.

In his preface, David Wagner writes that the photographs show the before. The after, he says, is the city we walk through today. That contrast is what makes the book such a quiet little gut-punch. You turn a page, recognise a corner you pass every week, and realise it once held a half-collapsed cinema run by people in their twenties.

The photographers are a mix of people who lived in those scenes and a few who came in to document them. The pictures are often informal, sometimes blurry, almost always full of life. There is no nostalgia in the captions — the editors let the images do the work — but it is hard not to feel a small twinge for a Berlin where rent was nothing and possibility was everything.

A book for anyone who loves the city, or anyone who has ever wondered what really came right after 1989.