In an atmosphere effused with the empathy of the general public and people around the globe, Germany – and Berlin in particular – recently finished celebrating the opening of the inner-German border 25 years ago. The festivities and commemorative events organised to mark the fall of the Wall on 9th November 1989 are a more than fitting occasion for the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, too, to dig out testimonies and artwork recalling the eventful history of the two Germanies.

The photography of Christian Borchert (1942 – 2000) represents a unique aesthetic and substantive response to everyday reality within the GDR and the effects of division and reunification. Borchert’s work is now held at the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) Dresden, and thanks to the SLUB’s German Photographic Archive many pictures from this large collection can now be called up in digital form in the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.

In the course of his career Borchert repeatedly addressed the subject of the Berlin Wall, as a subtle and somewhat distanced chronicler, and in the 1960s was already training his lens across the border to West Berlin. In the early 1980s he produced a series of photographs of television images that developed his distinctive and distancing view of the – in both senses of the word - ungraspable edifice that was the Berlin Wall.

This inevitable arm’s-length relationship to his subject evaporates abruptly after the 9th November 1989 and Borchert sets about capturing, in captivating pictures, a rampart that has been consigned to the history books: his subjects now include ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ and the border crossing points, now open to all and de facto obsolete, at Chausseestraße,, the Oberbaumbrücke and Bornholmer Straße.

One picture shows children throwing stones amidst Wall rubble, another isolated sections of Wall detritus that might almost be antique ruins were it not for the obligatory graffiti scrawled on the concrete. The impact of Christian Borchert’s Wall photos lies in the suggestive, often deceptively mute impressions, which present a new level of reflection in marked contrast to the drama of the period in which the pictures were taken.