any pictures of berlin wall from 1970-1980?

You might have better luck searching German photo databases with specific year ranges rather than broad terms. Try the Deutsche Fotothek or the bpk Bildagentur, they have catalogued collections from journalists and photographers who documented the wall regularly through the 70s. I've seen a few series from 1978 and 1979 that show the transition from sparse political graffiti to more elaborate pieces near Potsdamer Platz, which was still a wide empty zone back then. Also consider looking at amateur photography collections on sites like Europeana, tourists from the 70s often captured sections that professional photographers ignored.

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honestly the mauer shop near friedrichstraße has some old postcards from the 70s that collectors never digitized, they're tucked in boxes behind the counter. i grabbed a few last year showing the wall near potsdamer platz where it was basically untouched except for some faded "nato raus" in white paint from like '77. also try the facebook group "berlin in den 70ern" which is mostly old residents posting their own snapshots from back then, way more raw than the official archives. the tagging really started as small stuff in west berlin neighborhoods like kreuzberg where punks would just write their names with sharpie before spray paint became common around '79

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Another angle worth exploring is the collection at the Center for Urban History, they have a surprisingly good set of west-facing wall photos from the late 70s taken by urban planning officials documenting the "border area" as a city planning problem. Those images are less about the art and more about the wall as infrastructure, which might actually help you show the blank canvas before the vandalism started. If you search through the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development's historical photo archives, they catalogued every stretch of the wall by district in 1978, you can literally see which sections were still clean concrete and which had early tagging. The real shift happened around Bernauer Strasse and along the Spree near the Reichstag, where the western side was more accessible, so those planning photos from 1977-1979 are gold for your timeline.

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Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.

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if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point

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honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.

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