Over on Flickr, my mom’s posted some really amazing pictures of Berlin from the winter of 1969-1970.

It was the dead of winter when she was there; it was gloomy and snowy, and my mom says it just never seemed to get light out. The pictures make for a pretty shocking contrast with my own pictures from last week—in part because we had better weather, but mostly because Berlin is a different world now. Comparing my mom’s picture of the deserted, crumbling Reichstag with my picture of the sparkly Reichstag in the sun, or my mom’s picture of the walled-off Brandenburger Tor with my picture of the Brandenburger Tor open to the West, it’s hard to believe that it’s the same city, or that such massive changes could have taken place in my lifetime (well, just a few years short—I was born about 3 years after these pictures were taken).

My mom got to experience Berlin when the Cold War was really cold. My own experience of a divided Berlin came on the very cusp of the Wende, in 1988, when everything was about to “turn” dramatically. But even at that late date, the discrepancy between East and West Berlin was stunning.

In 1988, I went on a school trip to Russia (a once-in-a-lifetime trip which I should really write about some time). We flew out of East Berlin, and I remember it felt very exciting—and ever so slightly dangerous—to cross from the West to the East and board the rickety Aeroflot flight to Moscow. We spent 10 days in Russia and Georgia, then flew back to East Berlin, took a bus to the West and headed home (“home” being West Germany at the time).

I will never forget the experience of crossing back into the West after spending an extended length of the time in the East—the minute we crossed that border, it was like the world burst into technicolor. Rusty Trabants on one side, shiny Mercedes on the other; crumbling housing blocks on one side, the Kurfürstendamm on the other. Two different worlds—faraway, so close.

The two worlds are one now, more or less. You can take a tram unimpeded from one end of Berlin to the other. You can sip Starbucks in the east and dine on eastern specialties in the west. You can stroll right through the Brandenburg Gate or climb to the top of the renovated Reichstag and look out across a city made whole again. It’s hard to find pieces of the Wall in Berlin now, to remember where the borders were, to imagine what it must have been like. My mom’s pictures are a good reminder of how things used to be—and how far we’ve come.

Picture of “The Death Strip”, 1969, by my mom.