Using photographic evidence to explore the impact of the Berlin Wall

I remember being struck by the quote from Primo Levi when leaving Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam. He stated that ‘One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows’. While not trying to make any direct comparisons between life for those behind the Berlin Wall and the Jews during the horrors of the Holocaust, Levi’s quote points to a powerful idea that we might best understand history through the lives of individuals who experienced it first-hand. In one of the sessions I run for student teachers we examine a set of artefacts from a person who lived through the twentieth century. The individual’s life was shaped by personal, local, national and international events as the extraordinary events of the twentieth century unfolded. One of these events was the Cold War. The students examine passports and comment that he travelled behind the iron curtain on several occasions and it raises questions about how and why he did this given the context of the time...