Between 1993 and 1994, the Berlin photographer André Kirchner walked the city’s outer limit, beginning at the former Drewitz border crossing and circling anti-clockwise until he reached the Glienicker Brücke on the far side of Potsdam. The route, some 234 kilometres long, follows the boundary drawn in 1920 when surrounding parishes were absorbed into Greater Berlin, a line that roughly matches the city’s present outline. From that perimeter Kirchner turned his camera inward, making sixty single exposures that form a quiet, deliberate sequence of the urban edge. The resulting series, “Stadtrand Berlin,” is published here as “Berlin: The City’s Edge 1993/94,” issued by Hartmann Books in 2019 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall.
The photographs record a transitional landscape. Wall relics appear alongside working farmsteads, long avenues, factory ruins from the advance of twentieth-century industry, and newer satellite settlements. Kirchner’s panoramas do not argue or dramatise; they hold still, allowing the traces of a century of urban history to surface in a moment of quiet before post-reunification development remade these places. The book’s design, by Alexandra Zöller, supports that restraint, and the duotone printing gives the sequence a tonal coherence suited to its subject.
Edited by Ulrich Domröse and Thomas Köhler of the Berlinische Galerie, with an essay by Domröse, the volume accompanied an exhibition at the museum from 1 May to 29 July 2019. The German and English edition runs to 152 pages and includes roughly seventy illustrations. Its softcover format, with flaps and dimensions of 21.7 by 28 centimetres, keeps the book close to the scale of the prints while remaining easy to handle.
For viewers, the appeal lies in the conjunction of a specific historical moment and a coherent photographic method. The series was made within a year of the Wall’s removal, at a point when the former border was still legible in the landscape, and it is presented here as a complete sequence rather than a gathering of separate views. Kirchner’s decision to look inward from outside gives the work its distinctive tension, and the institutional context of the Berlinische Galerie, together with the editorial oversight of Domröse and Köhler, places the project within a considered documentary tradition. This is a book that rewards attention to sequence and to the slow accumulation of detail along a line that once divided a city.
