East Side Gallery

In the months after the fall of the Wall in November 1989, a lot was possible in Berlin. Pubs and clubs opened without permission in basements and abandoned factories. Residents planted the death strip. And the Wall became a gallery.

Since the 1980s, artists had been painting on the structure in large format – this was only possible on the western side. That changed with the fall of the Wall. In the spring of 1990, some creative people living in West Berlin wanted to conserve their joy about the open borders on the east side of the Wall. On the largest canvas in the world, they wanted to express that the urge for freedom overcomes any isolation. The initiators worked with an advertising agency and issued a worldwide appeal. Anyone could participate and freely choose the motif.

The Ministry of Defence of the GDR gave its approval. The organisers were allowed to paint a 1.3-kilometre stretch of the Wall between the Ostbahnhof and the Oberbaumbrücke. Along Mühlenstraße, the Wall was painted white, behind it lay the border strip and the banks of the Spree. 118 women, men and young people, professionals and amateurs from 21 countries beautified the concrete segments until September 1990. There were no wages and no funds for the creative people; they paid for their paint and materials themselves. The rough concrete was the painting surface. At the end of the month, the gallery on the Berlin Wall opened under the name East Side Gallery.

The plan of the project was to send the wall sections on tour at the end of the year and then auction them off. This, however, did not happen; the section of the Wall remained standing and was listed as a historical monument in 1991. Investors bought the strip of riverbank behind the paintings. They planned company headquarters, offices, hotels and high-end apartments in the area. An initiative wanted the strip along the riverbank and the East Side Gallery to be open to the public. It organised large protest rallies, especially in 2013, but their plan was neither legally nor financially feasible. Finally, parts of the wall were lifted out and moved several times to create access to the new buildings on the riverbank.

The paintings of the East Side Gallery were not protected and have been restored several times. In 2009, they were even removed and repainted on a more durable painting surface. A protective layer makes it easier to remove graffiti and signatures left by many guests. The gallery has long become one of the main attractions of the city. For the many visitors who come to take selfies, the historical background of the longest preserved piece of the Wall remains mostly hidden. In 2018, the Stiftung Berliner Mauer, in English Berlin Wall Foundation, took over responsibility for the gallery and provides Information on the history of the site. The fact that the East Side Gallery commemorates the joy about the fall of the Wall is important to the historians. The memory of the victims, however, is primarily reserved for the Berlin Wall Memorial on the Bernauer Straße.