Thinking back to his first stay in Berlin in June 1987, French photographer Alain Guillou still remembers how rarely people in the divided city ever smiled. “The soldiers around the military bases were always especially tense,” the 76-year-old recalls.
“None of the guards ever waved back at me when I greeted them up in their watch towers.” Accompanying late US billionaire Malcolm Forbes – heir to Forbes Magazine and one of the richest people in the world at the time – on a trip to West Germany, Guillou had a rare opportunity to experience Cold War Berlin from inside its centre of power in the former American sector.
“It looks like the world is cut in two by a huge white scar,” his notes about that day read.
Wandering around the bustling yet eerily tense city, the Frenchman realised how deeply the decades of separation had affected its population. “I was really trying to understand how Germans felt at the time,” Guillou says. “Until one day I saw a patrol from East Berlin pass through the US sector and remembered that the ‘enemies’ were actually just other Germans – and what that must have meant to people.” Fascinated by the Hauptstadt’s fraught political atmosphere, Guillou decided he wanted to capture the root of these lingering tensions, the Berlin Wall, from above.
Despite his friendship with publishing mogul Forbes, the aerial photographer wasn’t born into high society. Raised on a small island in the South Pacific, Guillou joined the French Naval Aviation at the age of 16, working as a sailing and flight instructor and spending the ensuing years travelling the world in hot air balloons.
He first crossed paths with Forbes in 1980, at a 17th-century château in Northern France. “He had actually invited me there for a ballooning event,” Gulliou recalls. “But within the first hours of my visit, we discussed how I could join him on his many travels as a photographer.” For seven years, the unlikely duo toured the world together: France, Thailand, Malaysia – and eventually Berlin.
To take some of the first professional aerial pictures of the Berlin Wall, Gulliou knew it would require convincing US military personnel to arrange the unusual photoshoot. As luck would have it, an opportunity arose a few days later at a high-profile dinner party with Forbes, West Berlin’s long-time Mayor Eberhard Diepgen and the US Commander of West Berlin John H. Mitchell.
“I told General Mitchell that this project could be a great way to remind the world of how the Americans had saved Berlin’s population from starving during the airlift,” Guillou recounts. “He liked the idea and approved the flight.”
Four months later, on October 9, 1987, Guillou boarded a black UH-1 military helicopter at Tempelhof Airport. In a snapshot taken shortly before takeoff, the then-39-year-old can be seen smiling alongside the pilot and crew, wearing a bright red windbreaker, a small Leica camera in his left hand and another one dangling from his neck. “As a photographer, I just felt extremely lucky to be there”, Guillou remembers. “I don’t think a flight like that had ever been done before by a professional photographer.”
Upon seeing the border – a deadly 155 km strip of barren wasteland studded with tripwires, booby traps and anti-tank barriers, bordered on both sides by a 3.6-metre-high concrete wall – from above for the first time, however, the Frenchman’s initial excitement turned into something more complicated. “It looks like the world is cut in two by a huge white scar,” his notes about that day read. “Berlin is an island of freedom, anchored in the middle of an ocean of totalitarianism.”
Guillou’s pictures from the flight, shot on Kodachrome film and featured in his upcoming photo book Berlin 1987: Flying over the Wall, illustrate the deep rift that ran through the city for more than 40 years. They show the wall running along the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, slicing through forests and parks, splitting up neighbourhoods wherever they happened to stand in the way.
In one of the most striking images, two young East German border guards carrying Kalashnikovs can be seen looking up at the US military helicopter, smiling directly into Guillou’s camera. “When they first spotted us, they didn’t react at all, keeping very serious – like anyone else I saw in East Berlin,” Guillou remembers. “So, I took down my camera for a second and did the pied de nez [a gesture commonly used by French children to tease someone] at them, which finally made them laugh.”
Although he never returned to Berlin after his memorable helicopter flight in the fall of 1987, Guillou says he is happy to see how much the city has evolved since then. “I really admire the Germans for what they have overcome,” he says. Now, Guillou wants his photos to be a gentle reminder of the division that politics driven by hate and polarisation can lead to. After all, Gulliou says, “people who forget their history have no future”.
