They did nothing to displease anyone. Much like Guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the US, assignments like this are highly coveted. Only the most strack troops are even considered for it. I have a video of these guards actually marching right toward my camera, from maybe 1988 or so. I’ll have to look, but I believe they carried SKS’s at the time I took the video.
And by that time the Grenztruppen wore much different uniforms, with the folding soft cap. I took this and other photos at about the same time.
Also, this is me and my girlfriend at the time riding in front of the Soviet Memorial in West Berlin - Streng Verboten!! - I simply followed a tour bus through the gate, as did my buddy on his bike. Almost sparked an international incident.
The Soviet mortarman is far heftier than he appears in the box art - hips and thighs like a good, stout, socialist Russian farmgirl. Maybe they even got one to post for the sculptor. I took a lot of meat of that figure to come up with this:
I can come very close to copying the pose exactly, although that is not really important as it represents a scene from a movie, but even so, the figure is just too comical to use even if I nail it. I may have all three Jelly Donuts standing more upright.
Something I very much can’t understand … I would consider anything like this a punishment But then, I would probably have made a very poor soldier anyway, given my propensity for questioning just about everything to find its “why”.
The ones I photographed two years later do, at any rate
I’m pretty sure that the Wachregiment “Friedrich Engels” that provided the ceremonial guards carried same up until the bitter end.
I always thought that they were bloody smart to be honest; the so-called goose-step was of course, a Prussian tradition, and whilst oft ridiculed, provides a certain cachet regarding military parade drill I feel.
I remember watching the new Lt that I drove for in REFORGER doing that for hours before we left the assembly area… It didn’t help. A few days later we ended up WAAAAYYYYYY out ahead of our Task Force at dusk and well into the other sides rear area where they just happened to be refueling… first time that I ever saw a M1 Abrams up close and personal…
I’ve started on the Litfaßsäule from this photo. It won’t be exact - the styles varied greatly, especially during different periods of Berlin’s history:
I’ve got all the components I need. I should have taken photos sooner - the cap had seven lines of text and/or numbers on it but I’ve already removed it.
I think you mean the fairly easy to miss comment about also doing a vignette with the man looking at a column …? That’s fairly easy to miss, IMHO, I say based on personal experience. I thought you were using that 1932 photo as inspiration rather than for a separate model.
Since I’ve deviated and shown things from a similar project, I’llk show more here rather than start a new thread. Berlin was world renowned for chess during the 1920’s. I’ll do a modified vignette of this scene:
That’s a very good guess. Except that that final word is shorter than “Spiel.” And as “Spiel” has an “I” in it, you would expect “Stube” to be at least as long. One thing is certain - it’s not “Karten” - but it does make sense.
The other thing is - Spiel Stube would normally be written without the space. As would my second guess - Speilsaal. Saal actually fits better size wise, but again, normally there’d be no space given the German penchant for making long words by sticking shorter words together.
At the very least I may change Karten to Saal after all.
I’ll send a free model kit to anyone who can find this exact image:
Except that doesn’t make much sense in the sentence, because what is “Spiel-Skat”?
The way there are hyphens after Biliard-, Schach- and Spiel- almost certainly means the last word can go after all three of them. I agree Stube doesn’t fit:
…but Saal does seem to. However, I’m not sure that’s what it actually says on the sign.
(This is using Futura extra-heavy, which is a reasonable match for the typeface on the real sign, perspective-warped in Photoshop to match the text in the photo.)
But then, I would probably have made a very poor soldier anyway, given my propensity for questioning just about everything to find its “why”.
