FOR HALF A century, no one has seen Berlin like this. The rickety ruin of the Brandenburg Gate, the empty shell of the adjacent French embassy and, opposite, the carbonised remains of the Hotel Adlon. And everywhere, the same tidy piles of bricks.
Berlin: 1950. The authorities in the Soviet sector have commissioned a photographer to document what's left of the city's architectural substance. It is five years since the end of a war that relieved the vast 19th-century streets of many of their buildings.
The photographer sets out with an assistant to preserve the almost lunar landscape created in the period between the end of the clean-up and the start of the rebuilding work.
The pre-war bustle is gone; just a few people prowl the streets, though the trams are running and the occasional car passes.
THE PICTURES WERE taken, filed and forgotten, until two years ago when Berlin photographer Arwed Messmer began researching a book with a trawl through the archives of the Berlinische Galerie, the city's leading photography museum.
In the archive of architectural prints he found a set of striking black-and-white images. After two years of work, Messmer has pieced them together into a dazzling portrait of Berlin as it has never been seen before.
"The post-war images we have of Berlin were, for obvious reasons, often propaganda. What makes these pictures unique is that they had no such propaganda aims. They were for technical purposes and never intended to be seen in public," he says.
The fact that the project was an official commission from the planning authorities guaranteed high quality of materials despite post-war scarcity.
As a result, the black-and-white pictures are startlingly clear and lose little detail even when blown up to the wall-filling prints at the Berlinische Galerie.
Not immediately apparent in the jumbled collection was the photographer's use of precise, overlapping shots. With computer technology, Messmer stitched these images together to create dazzling, dizzying panoramas.
"For the first time, we get a feeling of how Berlin really was in 1950," he says. "We see the relationship between the gaping emptiness left by the removed rubble and the new urban spaces created as a result. The pictures give us so much detail without trying to steer our gaze." The images of street scenes, intersections and landscapes occupy their own curious space - the transformation between historical document and aesthetic statement.
Considering the collection's value, it is extraordinary that it has lain untouched for almost six decades.
Amazing, too, that no one knew the identity of the photographer. The written documentation accompanying the images has been lost, leaving it to Messmer to play detective.
After several red herrings, the photographer has been identified with near-certainty as Fritz Tiedemann, a mathematician who was imprisoned in the Soviet sector around three years after taking the pictures.
Following his release he moved to the British sector and died in the western city of Münster in 2001.
THE REDISCOVERED PICTURES are more than just a trip back in time: they deliver a timely commentary on how Berlin continues to wrestle with its public spaces, six decades after the end of the war and nearly two decades after reunification.
One of the collection's highlights is a panorama shot of the end of Unter den Linden showing the Altes Museum, the ruin of the cathedral and the gaping spot where, until months before the shot was taken, the Kaiser's palace had stood.
Earlier this month Berlin authorities removed the last traces of the East German "Palast der Republic" from the same site.
For the second time in half a century, the most central site in Berlin has been freed of what the powers-that-be judge to be architectural ballast.
As a result, the view from then and the same spot today are startlingly similar, underlining the unhappy repetition of history.
There's another image in the 1950 collection showing one of Berlin's biggest stadiums, demolished in the 1990s in preparation for a failed Olympic bid.
After a temporary use as a driving range, it is once more a yawning hole in the cityscape, about to be filled by the new headquarters of the German secret service.
"I view these empty sites as metaphors for the incomplete, unsuccessful reunification between east and west," says Messmer. "The palace square and the whole area around it has been a planning disaster for years. For me, it's a visual metaphor for how the Germans are still wrestling with their identity." Messmer's rediscovery and reworking of Tiedemann's photographs brings alive in a spectacular way the contradictions of the city's relationship with its past. The pictures are also a fresh reminder of the by now infamous remark that Berlin is doomed to be always becoming, never being.
• So Weit Kein Auge Reicht (As Far as No Eye Can See) is at the Berlinische Galerie, Alte Jakobstraße, Berlin, until February 16.
www.berlinischegalerie.de
