We tried really hard to recreate the complete scene of 1957. We even got a cruise ship berthing at the same location, we just couldn't get the ship to face in the right direction.
This 1957 postcard, published by Bild und Heimat and displayed by vintagepostcards-archive.com is called Fahrgastschiff an der Havel, Kirche (Cruise ship at river Havel, church).
The cruise ship is the steam boat Sonnenschein (Sunshine). The boat was one of the last real steamers on river Havel. The author of this waymark, born in this town in the year the postcard was published, still remembers tours on the steamer in the early 1960s.
The church in the picture is Brandenburg's St. Johannis Church. A detail not shown in the postcard is that the church was hit by a bomb in 1945 and was only an empty, burned out shell when the picture was taken. The ruin collapsed in 1986 and the church was rebuilt only in 2015. Thus, even if the church looks the same from the outside in both pictures, on the inside it would haven been two very different stories.
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