A woman with a filled shopping bag waits at a Berlin bus stop for a double-decker bus whose exterior advertising promotes FEWA detergent. The stop sign with its characteristic ‘H’ and the inscription ‘Omnibus,’ along with the lively street traffic featuring Volkswagens in the background, convey an image of normalizing city life in West Berlin in 1955. The street view shows the typical juxtaposition of preserved Gründerzeit buildings and still-visible war gaps in the urban fabric. The advertising reference on the bus exemplifies the beginning economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) in West Berlin: the city presented itself as a functioning, advertising-integrated metropolis in the midst of the Cold War. The everyday scene of public transportation and civic street life was simultaneously part of the Western self-presentation as the “showcase of the West” against the Eastern Bloc.