The big, blippable Berlin Wall book: Taschen partners with Blippar to make commemorative coffee table book interactive

To commemorate the 25^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, iconic publishing house Taschen has created a stunning, encyclopaedic hardback volume exploring the rise and destruction of the symbol of the Cold War, which separated East and West Germany from 1961 until 1989.

And to make the reading experience even richer, more informative and more engaging, they recruited Blippar to make 20 of its 900 pages (and its cover) blippable. Readers just need to download the Blippar app onto their mobile phones and blipp the interactive pages to unlock all 21 pieces of fascinating audio and video footage from the archives, including dramatic scenes of the Wall’s fall on 9 November 1989.

Life behind the Iron Curtain: Art and artifacts from East Germany ($150/£99.99/€99.99) was compiled by Justinian Jampol, founder of The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, and his colleagues.

The Wende Museum in Los Angeles, California was established in 2002 to study the visual and material culture of the former Eastern Bloc. This book features more than 2500 items from its extraordinary collections, including art, archives, and artifacts from socialist East Germany.

Speaking about collaborating with Blippar to make the book interactive using our visual browser, Florian Kobler said: ‘TASCHEN decided to make the book interactive using Blippar because it is a unique opportunity to provide scholars and enthusiast readers from all around the world immediate access to some of the material that is stored in the vast multimedia archives of the Wende Museum – which would otherwise only be viewable on site in Los Angeles! Using augmented reality in this case allows us to bring an era, to bring history back to life through the embedded original material, so this technology greatly supports the overarching concept of the book, which is to show the GDR and its artifacts as objectively as possible.’

Simon Mukerjee, Blippar’s Head of Media, who worked on the project, commented: ‘It was such an honour to work with Taschen, an iconic publishing house, on this remarkable and important piece of history. The book itself is a sensationally rich written exploration of life behind the wall, and Blippar enables readers to immerse themselves even more fully in the story of the Berlin Wall by bringing 21 pages to life with interactive audio and video content.’

Blipp the pages of the book reproduced here to experience the book’s immersive mobile content for yourself.