East Side Gallery

Today I was one of 800,000 annual visitors to manoeuvre their way along the 1,3 Kilometer longest intact part of the Berliner Mauer. I say manoeuvred because it was teaming with people. Die East Side Gallery (ja, that’s the original German name) was established in 1990, the year after der Fall der Mauer, and is special because its murals, created von 118 artists aus 21 countries to celebrate Freiheit/freedom after so many years of segregation and oppression, were painted on the East Berlin side, where there had never been any graffiti before due to lack of access.
There’s a lot of human traffic around the most popular murals.
At the iconic der Bruderkuss (‘Mein Gott hilf mir, diese tödliche Liebe zu überleben’ = ‘My God help me to survive this deadly love’) by Dmitri Vrubel of Leonid Brezhnev (the former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), and Erich Honecker (the former General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party) there’s a gaggle of couples waiting to stage the requisite kissing scene in front of their international counterparts – Take 1, take 2, take 3 ... I lost count.
Birgit Kinder’s Trabi car breaking through the wall also pulls a crowd.
Naja, I went for neither here and posted a bit of Deutsch, although I’m not total happy mit the Englisch translation. Besser: Lots of small people who do lots of small things in lots of small places can change the face of the world. Just sayin’.
What not everyone knows is that the murals were repainted in 2009 (often by the original artist) because they had deteriorated as a result of vandalism and the weather and that in 2013 part of the wall (23 Meter) was destroyed at the East Side Gallery in order to build deluxe apartments on the site. Na toll! Protesters against the construction included American Baywatch star David Hasselhoff... The Hoff's celebrity is rather bizarrely intertwined with the Berlin Wall. His hit single, Looking for Freedom, was number one in the German charts for eight weeks during the Sommer of 1989 before the wall fell and he played a New Year's Eve concert on the remains of the wall a few weeks later. The Hoff has since admitted he hadn’t been aware of the significance of his song for East Germans until years later… Hoffnungslos vielleicht?