Passengers board a streetcar of the Berlin Straßenbahn at a tram stop in the western part of Berlin; the stop sign is clearly legible, with an advertising column beside it. In the background rises unmistakably the ruin of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church on the Kurfürstendamm – a war-damaged torso left standing since the end of the war, which in 1955 remained unsecured and surrounded by rubble. The image combines two characteristic facets of West Berlin everyday life in the mid-1950s: the functioning public transport system as a sign of returning normalcy and the omnipresent presence of war destruction. The Memorial Church served at this time already as a symbol of the divided yet recovering West Berlin and was deliberately employed in Western Allied film material as a contrast to reconstruction.