East Side Gallery

The story

On the western side the Berlin Wall was painted for years. Anyone could walk up to it. On the eastern side it stayed white. Here people walked and drove past it every day, and nobody dared put a mark on it.

The border opened on 9 November 1989. Within months artists came to this stretch with ladders. What they made is a picture of one year, 1990, when nobody yet knew how things would turn out.

Close by, with a page of its own: Berlin Wall Memorial, Brandenburg Gate.

What is here

One wall with two faces, a strip of riverbank and a bridge. All of it is public ground.

If you have one minute

In front of the kiss

Two old men in suits kiss on the mouth, eyes shut. One is Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader. The other is Erich Honecker, who ran East Germany.

It happened. The kiss was a formal greeting between communist leaders, and a French photographer caught this one in East Berlin in October 1979, at the thirtieth birthday of the East German state. The Russian painter Dmitri Vrubel saw the photograph and painted it here in 1990, over three metres high.

Under it he wrote, in Russian and German: "My God, help me to survive this deadly love." Ten years earlier that would have meant prison. By 1990 the state that built the wall could no longer stop a man painting on it.

Things people often get wrong

"This is graffiti from the Cold War." Not one of these paintings was here while the border was shut. All were painted between February and September 1990.

"I am looking at the paint of 1990." Mostly not. Weather, exhaust and visitors' pens wore the pictures away. In 2009 the wall was repaired and stripped, and the artists were asked to paint their pictures again. Most did. A few refused.

"West Berlin was on the other side of this wall." The river was. The whole width of the Spree belonged to the East, and West Berlin began on the far bank.

"It is a gallery." There is no door, no ticket and no closing time. It is a pavement beside a busy road.

People who stood here

• Dmitri Vrubel (Russian painter, 1960–2022)He came from Moscow in 1990 and was given a segment like everyone else. His kiss became the most photographed picture in Berlin. In 2009 he painted it again from the beginning, and he spent his last years in the city.
• Régis Bossu (French press photographer)He took the photograph of the kiss in October 1979. It ran across two pages of a Paris magazine. Without his picture there would be no painting.
• Thierry Noir (French painter, born 1958)He moved to West Berlin in 1982 and lived in a squat beside the Wall. In 1984 he began to paint it, on the western side, with big bright heads in profile. He painted fast and simply. Here in 1990 he painted the same heads on the side he had never seen.
• Birgit Kinder (German painter, born 1962)She grew up in East Germany and painted the car she knew: a Trabant, the small East German car with a plastic body, bursting through the wall towards you. The number plate is the date the border opened.
• Kani Alavi (Iranian-born painter, born 1955)He came to West Berlin in 1980 and lived by the crossing called Checkpoint Charlie. On the night of 9 November he watched from his window as the crowd came through. He painted their faces here, and for many years led the artists' fight to keep the wall standing.
• Günther Schaefer (German painter and photographer)He painted the German flag with the Star of David laid over it, for two ninths of November: 1938, when synagogues burned across Germany, and 1989. It has been defaced dozens of times. He repaints it each time.
• Christine MacLean (Scottish gallerist)In 1990 she found the artists, handed out the segments and the paint, and got leave from the East German authorities, who still owned the wall.
• Çetin Mert (child, 1970–1975)He lived on the western bank opposite. On his fifth birthday, 11 May 1975, his ball rolled into the river and he went in after it. West Berlin firemen stood on the bank and were not allowed into the water, because the water was East.

Go deeper: eight stops along the wall

The wall runs along Mühlenstraße from the East Station to the Oberbaum Bridge. The stops below are not in walking order. The crowd will show you where the kiss is.

1. The wall itself

Look at it before you look at the paintings. Each segment is an L of concrete 3.6 metres high and 1.2 metres wide, and weighs nearly three tonnes. A crane stood them in a row. The round pipe on top was to stop hands and hooks.

This road was also the way official guests were driven in from the airport. That is the reason usually given for the wall here being the best kind, smooth and painted white.

2. The kiss

In 2009 the old painting was scraped off and the painter stood here on a scaffold, copying his own work from a photograph. He was upset to find the original gone. The second version is sharper and cleaner. Whether it is the same picture is a fair question.

The same shot: come before nine in the morning, when the pavement is empty, and stand back as far as the kerb.

3. The Trabant

East Germans waited ten years and more for one of these cars. In November 1989 they drove them west in long queues, two-stroke engines smoking, and West Berliners banged on the roofs in welcome. The painter first called the picture "Test the Best", a play on a cigarette slogan of the time, "Test the West". When she repainted it she changed one word.

4. The heads

Big lips, one eye, flat colour, a black outline. They look like a child's drawing and they are meant to. The painter has said that a picture on the Wall had to be done quickly.

5. November

A river of faces pours through a gap. Look at the faces one by one. Some are laughing. Many are frightened, or blank. The painter watched the real crowd and did not see only joy.

6. The flag

Black, red and gold, with a six-pointed star laid over it. In Germany 9 November is two dates in one. That is why the country's national day is 3 October and not the day the Wall opened.

Near by, a painter who grew up in East Berlin dreaming of Japan painted a detour to a sector the city never had: a Japanese one.

7. The other side

Walk through one of the gaps to the river. This side faced West. It is covered in tags now, and there is a lawn where the guarded strip was. Sit on the bank. The far shore was another country.

Between 1966 and 1975 five children from the western bank fell into this water and drowned while rescuers argued about who was allowed to go in. After the fifth, the two governments signed an agreement, and rescue posts were set up along the bank.

8. The bridge

The wall ends at the Oberbaum Bridge: red brick, two towers, a railway on top and a covered walk beneath, built in the 1890s. While the city was divided it was a crossing on foot only, for people with day passes. Now the yellow underground trains cross it every few minutes.

In the film Run Lola Run (1998) a young woman with bright red hair runs through the arcade under the tracks to save her boyfriend. Stand at the end of the arcade and you have the shot.