Angus Boulton's photographs remind us of the Cold War by showing us a very particular set of its remnants: an abandoned bunker entrance; a firing range; and a gymnasium. These pictures are from a larger body of work: photos taken on abandoned military bases in Germany. Other photos show officers' cottages, a cinema, a kindergarten and so on. They show the military bases not primarily as explicit sites of violence, but as places of ordinary life. Yet in these pictures the bases are all abandoned. Derelict. There is paint peeling off the walls. What we are seeing are the ruins of the Cold War, the abandoned military installations that were closed to us – and therefore invisible – when people – the Soviet military – were still there, using them. These pictures throw an unusual light on the Cold War. They show us some of the remaining, decaying military geography of this conflict.

I come to these pictures from a particular angle. I know this landscape: this is the architecture that marked the division of the Germany of my youth. We in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) of course did not see the bases in Boulton's pictures then; they were located within the territory of the German Democratic Republic (GDR): off limits not just as military bases always are, but also on the other side of the closed border. Yet we certainly saw other aspects of the military geography: the border installations, the no-man's land, the watchtowers. We saw the signs in Berlin warning us where we were about to leave the American, British or French sector, those stark reminders of the FRG's incomplete sovereignty. We saw the Western Allies' military convoys on the Autobahnen. And we saw their barracks and bases. This military geography of the Cold War might have blended in because it was so much part of our lives then. We might actually have failed to really see it at the time, but it was never invisible. It was there, right in our face.

Boulton's pictures of these military bases are bleak. Perhaps this is because there are no people anywhere in them. Gymnasia should be full of people. Of course, at times no one might be free for a game of basketball, but in these pictures the military bases are entirely emptied of people. No one is practising at the firing range. The bunker entrance is really a gate in the woods that has no function any more. There is no one around. In these photos, the Cold War has been abandoned and with it its military installations, which are therefore falling apart. Decay is not exactly a pleasant sight, though it may at times have a strange beauty. But there is something else. The complete emptiness, the decay, the peeling wall paint in the gym: they seem to invoke the time when the paint was still intact and happy, healthy young people were using the basketball hoop, when children were playing in the kindergarten – and when the bunker was still in use. That is, the photos that picture the abandoned spaces of ordinary life seem to suggest the passing of a better time, a mourning, if you will, for a lost past. And this perhaps is the root of my unease when I look at these photographs. I cannot help the feeling that they express a nostalgia, a nostalgia for the time when there was life in these gyms and cinemas. But then there was also activity on the firing range and the bunker had a purpose. Boulton's pictures do not hide this function of the military base, and yet the absence of human life seems most noticeable in the spaces of ordinary life. It is their emptiness and decay that may make us not only imagine the time when they were in use but regret its passing.

This air of nostalgia makes me uneasy. It makes me recall the unease I remember feeling whenever I had to be in the GDR, whether on my way from my home in West Germany to West Berlin or on a tourist expedition to East Berlin. Some indeed do yearn for this past, for political reasons, but also, in some cases, because it is recalled as a time when daily life could simply be enjoyed, when it had not yet been complicated by the pressures of change. Yet this is a problematic memory. Boulton's photos, of course, also remind us of why this is so: it was a time of intense military conflict. The bases are its architectural remnants. Yet much of the effect of this conflict remains unseen. There are no people here. No people separated from the friends and relatives on the other side, unable, until 1971, to even phone them, able to visit them in the GDR only under restrictive conditions, and not really at all the other way. No people subject to the scrutiny of GDR authorities when transiting between the FRG and West Berlin by car or train. No people trying in various desperate ways to cross the border to leave the GDR. No people – like Chris Gueffroy in February 1989, the last person shot at the Berlin Wall – losing their lives attempting to do so.

In Boulton's pictures we see the bases now, but not the people who belonged to them or who were affected by them one way or another. Boulton shows us the remnants of the Cold War, and thereby reminds us of the gravity of that conflict, of the marks it left on a country that was at its centre. What he does not show us is the people affected, either then or now. Soviet troops may have enjoyed happy times in the gymnasium, but where have they gone now? What of the people who were affected by the presence of these troops in the first place? They are perhaps missing in an even stronger sense from these photographs which show the Cold War that was so important to their lives through the spaces from which they were excluded. We do not see in these pictures the impact that the Cold War had on people's lives. It is the extraordinariness of ordinary life that is missing from these pictures. The Cold War and Germany were not unusual in this sense. There have been and are many similar situations of divided societies, and many worse.

It is ironic, of course, that I should now remember the Cold War as marked by the division of Germany; for I could not say that I felt my country to be divided at the time. It was not: my country was the FRG. Indeed, as a young German in whose lifetime there had then never been a Germany encompassing both FRG and GDR, I was puzzled by the desire for unification that other Germans clearly had in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I could not see how the people of the GDR and I somehow belonged together, as was suggested. Yet, looking back now, that old FRG – that FRG without the GDR – seems to have something missing. As someone who works on memory, I am acutely aware of the illusion of a past that never quite existed in the way we remember it now. What I remember now is affected by the present that had then not yet been. Do you remember the Cold War? – I do, and vividly – though it may of course not have been as I think it was.