In spring 1990 — Wall open, DDR still technically existing — 118 artists from 21 countries were invited to paint the eastern side of a 1.3 km stretch along the Spree. That side had always been blank concrete: no East Berliner could ever get close enough to touch it, let alone paint it. Covering it in colour was the point. It opened in September 1990 as the East Side Gallery and became the longest open-air gallery in the world.
Dmitri Vrubel’s “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love” shows Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and DDR leader Erich Honecker kissing on the mouth. It’s based on a real photo from 1979 — the “socialist fraternal kiss” was an actual diplomatic ritual between communist leaders, and Brezhnev was famously enthusiastic about it. The painting turned the ritual into the defining image of a suffocating alliance.
A few panels along, Birgit Kinder’s “Test the Best” shows a Trabant — the DDR’s cardboard-bodied people’s car — smashing through the Wall, licence plate reading NOV 9-89, the night it fell. Between the murals, look at the river: people drowned trying to swim this stretch of the Spree, because the whole width of the water belonged to the East.