The photograph shows an extensive rubble field in Berlin, taken in summer 1955—ten years after the end of the war. In the foreground, heaps of bricks and concrete fragments are piled high; wild vegetation has already established itself among them, indicating destruction dating far back and slow reconstruction. Scattered ruins and partially preserved residential buildings are visible in the middle ground and background. The image strikingly illustrates how hesitant reconstruction proceeded in parts of Berlin, while elsewhere in the western part of the city the beginning of the economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) was already becoming visible. The photograph thus exemplifies the deep contradiction in Berlin in 1955: between the shop windows and consumer worlds of the West on the one hand and the still ubiquitous wounds of the Second World War on the other.