Two brothers meet for a Christmas reunion after having been separated by the Berlin Wall (at this point only two years old). It was the first meeting of East/West relatives allowed by the East German government following the wall’s construction.
West Berlin - 1963
(Photo by Ian Berry)
exquisite-joys-exquiste-sorrows:
SARAJEVO, BOSNIA - 1995: In the dangerous suburb of Dobrinja, Meliha Varesanovic walks proudly and defiantly to work during the Siege of Sarajevo, 1995. Her message to the watching Serb gunmen who surround her city is simple, “you will never defeat us.” After the war Meliha revisited the street with Getty Images photographer Tom Stoddart who captured her striking appearence and attitude.(source: http://www.thisisthewhat.com/2012/05/tom-stoddart-women-of-sarajevo-revisited/)
Meliha Varesanovic, definiton of swag
During the siege of Sarajevo (1992-1995), this woman, this photo became a symbol. A symbol for the spirit of women from and in Sarajevo. A symbol for the people’s resistance. She walked down the notorious “Sniper Alley” like a lady. She and other women of Sarajevo refused to become caricatures of the war. A war in which mass rape was used as a tactic to destroy the people’s self-worth, pride, dignity.
They kept their heels and heads high. They didn’t allow them to take away their elegance, their pride. Looking as elegant, as ladylike, as normal as possible in the gruesome, grueling, deathly surroundings of war, was their way of saying: “Fuck you! You can take away our water, food, money, electricity, hell even our lives, but not what we are and what we stand for!”
This woman, these women of Sarajevo are my personal heroes and role models.
(via laiika)
Scenes from World War II Photoshopped Onto Today’s Streets
“It is a bit like painting with history,” Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse says of her project “Ghosts of History.”
She got the idea a few years ago when she found some old negatives at a flea market in Amsterdam, where she lives. “I was very curious about these mysterious photos and wanted to find out who took them and where. So I started to walk around Amsterdam and made photos in the same spot where the old photos were made and combined them on the computer.”
See more. [Images: Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, Unknown, Tom Timmermans]
This day in history:
Amid protests across Soviet-dominated Hungary, violence erupts, sparking the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
Soon after the revolution began the Soviet Union planned to give in to demands and withdraw forces from the country. However they quickly changed plans and sent in a large military force to quash the rebellion and regain control.
Revolutionaries made quick and large gains up to the end of October, but stood no chance against the superior Soviet military. The rebellion eventually ended on November 10, two and a half weeks after it began.
Despite calls for help to western countries (especially the USA), the revolutionaries received no support during the conflict, and Hungary was dominated by Soviet oppression until 1989.
October 23, 1956 - 56 years ago today
London Calling: The Blitz in Color by William Vandivert (via LIFE)
(via greatestgeneration)
Audio of American journalist Daniel Schorr’s report from Berlin on August 13, 1961; the day on which the East Germany government began construction of the Berlin Wall.
This morning East Berlin presents an eerie picture:
Communist troops in force on every street corner. Soldiers of the Communist National Army drawn up along the sector boundary with columns of armored cars, and behind them, by the tens of thousands, the worker’s militia in their sloppy brown uniforms and visored caps bearing an uncanny resemblance to the stormtroopers of Adolf Hitler…
…East Berlin is an armed camp. It is also a witch’s cauldron, gradually coming to a boil.
This day in history:
Minutes before giving a speech on a campaign stop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Theodore Roosevelt is shot in an assassination attempt.
The would-be assassin’s bullet is slowed down after travelling through a steel eyeglass case and the folded, fifty page speech he intended to give, stopping in his chest. Realizing that he wasn’t coughing up blood, Roosevelt figured he was well enough to go ahead and deliver his speech rather than rush to the hospital.
He spoke for the next 90 minutes, opening with the words:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”
Doctors deemed it too risky to remove the bullet, and Roosevelt carried it with him inside his body for the rest of his life.
October 14, 1912 - 100 years ago today
There was a tradition in the German army of taking a photo of the shortest and tallest soldiers next to each other.
When Buchenwald was liberated, the prisoners mocked this tradition and posed for a photo of the tallest and shortest prisoner.
Charles Gardner reporting live during a failed German attack on a British convoy, during which a German pilot was shot down and bailed out of his aircraft above the English Channel.
(July 14, 1940)
