Travel Log | Berlim Day 2 - The East Side Gallery

 I almost skipped this place. It turned out to be one of my top 3 favourite things about Berlin. 

The east side gallery is an open air gallery, a series of murals painted on the longest surviving session of the Berlin Wall between the Berlin Ostbahnhof and the Oberbaumbrücke along the river Spree. This was high on my list of places to visit but it was the end of my second day in Berlin. I was exhausted, it was already past 18:00h and it looked like it was about to rain. After an energizing donut however, I decided to power through and take the train to Ostbahnhof. By the time I reached the wall, it had started to drizzle. I couldn't have asked for a more perfect ambience. 

I walked alongside the wall all the way to the bridge (Oberbaumbrücke) and back, taking video and photos of the images on the murals, listening to a specially crafted playlist for Berlin. "Burning heart" by survivor, "Burning down the house" by the Talking heads, "Helden" by David Bowie and "Nikita" by Elton John were some of the tracks. And on the way back I stopped where there was a gap in the wall, to seat at the margins of the Spree to take in everything.

My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love, Dimitri Vrubel - This is one of the best known murals on the wall - it was incredibly difficult to take this picture as there were always a ton of tourists around this specific image. It depicts a fraternal kiss between Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker, that was captured in a photograph in 1979. According to the artist: "In this painting, there's one German and one Russian, and the Berlin Wall is about the same thing but in reverse: here [in the painting], there's total love, while the Berlin Wall separates two worlds – it was a perfect fit."

A small sentence, kind of in Portuguese - I have no idea what an "impensamental" is.

Larger view of the mural above... "Amor e Paz" also made an appearance on the wall.

The Trabant breaking through the wall, Brigit Kinder- The Trabant was the car everybody had in socialist East Berlin. It was more expensive to get an used one, because if you bought an used Trabant you would get the car straight away from someone else, while if you bought it new, you would have to stand in line (some were still in the line at the time of the fall of the GDR). The one good thing about this car was that if something broke it would be easy to find parts because everybody had the same one. These little cars are everywhere in Berlin still, but nowadays mostly as a touristic curiosity - I think it is possible to drive one of these around for an hour or so. It's a clever idea, painting such an icon of Socialist Berlin as a tool to escape this very regime.

 

I personally preferred where there were more visual elements and less writing on the murals.

 

It happened in November, Kani Alavi- This one caught my eye because it reminded me of Operarios, by Tarsila do Amaral.  It is meant to represent the very day the wall fell, with dozens of eastern faces pouring into the west, with a myriad of different expressions. The facial expressions are a bit on the nose, especially as the painting is not too realistic, but it's a cool idea nonetheless.

This is the longest mural on the wall. Apparently at one point, even the ground in front of it was painted as well. The gallery was first created in 1990, but over time most of the paintings degraded considerably, and the wall was subjected to some vandalism. So, in 2009, most of the artists who had painted the original murals came together again, to repaint their art, this time with more durable materials.