U-bhf. Zoo
U-bhf. Zoo
Up the stairs from the U-bahn, and a Berlin couple comes out into the new city built in place of the ruins which were left in this area after World War II. In addition to the S-bahn and Interzone trains converging on the Zoo Station, U-bahn lines also converged on the area.
Travel agencies and ticket offices gathered in office spaces near the Zoo Station, including the Bundesbahn's sales center. This requires some explanation: the railways in Berlin were operated by the Deutsche Reichsbahn (German State Railways), using the old name of the German national system. As a result of the agreements on the status of Berlin, the Soviets had been given charge of the whole rail net in all sectors of Berlin, to go along with their control of the rail net in their zone of Germany. They turned this responsibility over to the government of the German Democratic Republic. This meant that Berlin railway station ticket counters were run under the bland, slow-moving and under-funded Reichsbahn, a railway concern which considered West Germany's rails to be in a different country.
As a result of this situation, the West German railway organization, the Deutsche Bundesbahn (German Federal Railways) operated its own customer service center down the street from the Zoo Station. There I found the staff helpful and patient, and they were well-supplied with timetables and other material that helped me to learn about European rail travel.
As a sidelight, one might ask why a Communist country, the German Democratic Republic, known to the American public as East Germany, and to the U.S. military as the Soviet Zone of Germany, retained the name of the old railway entity. To add to this, they kept the historic name "Mitropa" for their dining and sleeping car company, and the "Reichspost" name for their postal system. As events unfolded in Berlin, I began to realize that the East German's problem was their insecurity as a government. Hanging onto the trappings of the former regimes was a way of trying to establish their legitimacy.
In the photo, the look on the young couple's faces always made me think
that they were part of the new world represented by the Bundesbahn, rather
than the old world of the Reichsbahn.
Continue on photo tour. Weitermachen!