Berlin Wall fragment at Bernauer Straße (Picture by A. Genest)
The image most people have of the Berlin Wall today is based on this view of its western face, covered in graffiti and drawings. From the East-German point of view, it was the last in a series of insurmountable obstacles, cordoned off and concealed from sight.
A new online documentation “Memorial Landscape of the Berlin Wall” is provided by the Dept. of Conservation at Brandenburg University of Technology that strives to fill in this gap between image and reality, a reality that has become history and is nearly not visible today in downtown Berlin.
The interactive map is going to be released also in an English version.
When Poland regained its independence in 1918 it faced a challenge of making a new set of maps for a new country. Its first task was to form a coherent and updated system from the maps of Polish territory originally drawn by the partitioning powers (German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires). By 1939 all 482 sheets for the area of pre-war Poland were published, together with around 280 additional sheets (”wyłącznie do użytku służbowego” or “for internal use only”) to cover the adjacent areas of neighbouring countries, i.e. USSR, Lithuania, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Nowadays these maps are a source of information about pre-WW2 Poland. They can be used e.g. to locate villages which have long disappeared from the ground or to find former names of streets and buildings on historical city maps.
A private, non-profit projekt provides free online access to scanned maps and other materials published and owned by the “WIG” (Wojskowy Instytut Geograficzny).
http://english.mapywig.org/
The Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy offers reproductions of maps of the eastern regions that belong to Germany before 1918. Topograhic maps (1: 25 000,
1: 100 000) as well as general maps of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia (1: 300 000) can be purchased online.
The data base “historical place names” provides information about various different names of villages and cities in the past and about the affiliation of the settlements to administrative districts.
With the help of data from telephone directories it is possible to visualize the regional distribution of surnames. So you can draw conclusions about their origin. There are appropriate websites concerning family names in the
More complicated is the search for Polish names: By submitting a name, the heraldic-genealogical service provides a code, which you have to copy and paste into a form on the website of GenPol (Genealogia Polska) for displaying a map, that shows the distribution of people with this surname in Poland.
Thanks to the initiative of the Berlin citizen Mirko Tamkus 26 historical Berlin maps in the time from 1738 until 1989 are accessible to the public at Berlin city map archive.
The navigation of the scans is very comfortable and completed by an index of streetnames.
When you enter the name of a street all those maps are listed where this street could be found. But the index partly seems to be incomplete and still work in progress.
A new map shows building damages in Berlin at the end of Worldwar II. Also an archive of photographs is under construction. Beyond that the offer is supplemented by
a Newsletter, bibliographical references and a linklist.
