Berlin Fruchtstrasse Am 27 Mrz 1952 On March 27 1952

On March 27, 1952, photographer Fritz Tiedemann photographed the Berlin street Fruchtstrasse, between Ostbahnhof and Stalinallee, working for the East Berlin mayor's office. His photos produced views of the façades of the buildings on the street seven years after the end of World War II, and two decades before the buildings were demolished - although the plan to destroy them had already been drawn up when Tiedemann took his pictures. Today, Fruchtstrasse is called Strasse der Pariser Kommune and Stalinallee is Karl-Marx-Allee. Arwed Messmer (*1964 in Schopfheim) and Annett Gröschner (*1964 in Magdeburg) have used these images as the basis for a fascinating project in photography and literature. As in previous joint projects, photographer Messmer and writer Gröschner explore aspects of the documentary. Messmer digitally joins Tiedemann's thirty-two single negatives to produce a single panorama portrait of the street and its people, a portrait which is also found in archive documents and research on its history - used by Annett Gröschner in her text 'Great Beetroots Today'--Cf. Foreword, page 9.