Since we moved to Berlin early in 2012, we have been researching how this city used to look like before all the wars. This week, we stumbled upon this interesting short movie that shows Berlin streets between 1900 and 1914, a little before the First World War.
This is the Belle Époque Berlin, with streets filled with cars, bikes, trolleys, and trains. All of them are crammed in the same place, moving together and bringing Berlin into the modern day. The vehicles moving together in a city still unused to them get a bit of chaos that would be nice to observe.
But even with the chaos you can see in the video above, those times are idyllic to the Berlin streets. Those people move around and enjoy their days without knowing what will happen in the future.
The video was shot between 1900 and 1914 and shows a more relaxed Berlin. A city unaware of a First World War about to happen and the decades of destruction that were right around the corner.
This destruction that happened to Berlin is one of the reasons we really liked this short movie. It shows a city we are not familiar with. It is filled with buildings, shops, and streets we cannot recognize. We can see what we believe is Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. We can see something like Alexanderplatz, but it might be somewhere else. We see bikes and trees, but none are familiar to us.
This is why this video is like a trip back in time to a city that used to exist where Berlin stands now. Too bad that the terrible decisions of the past stopped us from enjoying what Berlin used to be.
The postcard at the beginning of the article shows Friedrichstrasse in 1910, and we found it on Flickr. You can see the video here if you have any problems with the link above.
