Commissioned by the municipal authorities of Berlin, on March 27, 1952, Fritz Tiedemann took photographs of Berlin’s Fruchtstraße between the Ostbahnhof and Stalinallee. His images document views of the façades of the buildings on the street seven years after the end of World War II and two decades before the buildings were demolished.

The plan to destroy them was already in place when Tiedemann produced his pictures. Arwed Messmer (*1964 in Schopfheim) and Annett Gröschner (*1964 in Magdeburg) used these images as the source material for a fascinating project in photography and literature. As in previous joint projects, photographer Messmer and writer Gröschner explore aspects of the documentary in photography. Messmer digitally joins Tiedemann’s thirty-two individual negatives to produce a single panorama portrait of Fruchtstraße and its people, a portrait that is also found in archive documents and research on the street’s history and is taken up by Annett Gröschner in her text.