YOU ARE HERE: DIPPING AT THE REICHSTAG

Strolling through vanished Berlin

Kids bathing near the Reichstag by Boris Pushkin, via Deutscher Bundestag and German History Museum, Berlin.

Online and in the press, this great photo has never lost its great popularity. Now, with the 81th anniversary of the end of the Second World War nigh, it re-appears again.

However, the caption you often see underneath - “Children bathing in the Spree at the Reichstag in 1945” - contains four facts and one misconception. Here is why.

When in 1945 Boris Pushkin, Soviet photographer, took this picture, it was not the Spree that his camera captured. Those girls and boys were swimming not in the river but in a massive basin that was created between the river and Königsplatz (now Platz der Republik) before the Reichstag building. It served as a tank barrier and was in fact, a flooded U-Bahn (Berlin Tube or Subway) tunnel of line which had been planned still before the war but was never built.

Here you can see in Hein Gorny's photo (Gorny was a brilliant self-taught German photographer, by the way, whose Neue Sachlichkeit - New Subjectivity - images are worth looking up online).

In this photo the arrow is pointing at the Reichstag building. South of the basin you can exactly see the flooded line of the never-built underground railway line.

Tank-barrier at the Reichstag and the flooded never-completed U-Bahn tunnel. Image via Historical Imagery Google Earth.

It pays to be critical of photo captions, especially with time working against us - with the Internet spreading information at the current speed and with fewer and fewer people will be able to recognise inaccurate descriptions, it is not unlikely that one day history will be partly re-written by a simple act of persistent repetition. Which does not imply any willing disinformation - just our battered but still very much alive instinct to believe what we read.

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