The Brotherly Kiss

Why is it significant?

There they are: two grey-haired men in dark suits, eyes shut, locked in a kiss on the mouth, painted larger than life on the concrete. Every few seconds someone poses in front of them, puckering up for a selfie.

Key Facts

Open the walk

There they are: two grey-haired men in dark suits, eyes shut, locked in a kiss on the mouth, painted larger than life on the concrete. Every few seconds someone poses in front of them, puckering up for a selfie.

The men are Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, and Erich Honecker, leader of East Germany. In October 1979, at the celebrations for the thirtieth anniversary of the GDR, they greeted each other with the socialist fraternal kiss, a ritual embrace between communist comrades. A French photographer, Régis Bossu, caught it at the perfect, awkward moment, and the picture went round the world.

In 1990 the Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel painted the scene here, and beneath it he wrote, in Russian and German, a line that means: My God, help me to survive this deadly love. It is a joke, and it is not a joke at all. That kiss was the image of an alliance that kept East Germany alive... and kept its people locked in. The Wall it was painted on was part of that same embrace.

Vrubel repainted his work in 2009 with the rest of the gallery; he spent his later years living in Berlin and died there in 2022. Look a little further along for another crowd favourite: a boxy white Trabant, the East German people's car, bursting straight through the Wall, painted by Birgit Kinder and titled Test the Best. In November 1989, thousands of Trabants really did putter across the border, trailing blue smoke.

Before you move on, find one of the gaps and walk round to the river side of the Wall. Here the death strip once ran down to the water; today there are lawns, beach bars and a view straight across the Spree to Kreuzberg. Then follow the Wall to its end and climb onto the red-brick bridge with the castle towers.