East Side Gallery: The Wall the West Never Saw

Why is it significant?

Start at the western end of Mühlenstraße and turn so the painted concrete runs away from you towards the river bridge: slab after slab after slab, splashed with faces, slogans, cartoons and colour, for more than a kilometre. Traffic hums past on one side.

Key Facts

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Start at the western end of Mühlenstraße and turn so the painted concrete runs away from you towards the river bridge: slab after slab after slab, splashed with faces, slogans, cartoons and colour, for more than a kilometre. Traffic hums past on one side. On the other, behind the Wall, flows the Spree. Here is the paradox: this is a piece of the Berlin Wall that West Berliners never saw. It was the inner wall, the so-called hinterland wall, facing East Berlin. The real border was the river behind it, and the West, Kreuzberg, lay on the far bank. So while the western face of the Wall elsewhere was covered in graffiti for decades, this side stayed grey and blank, because no one in the East was allowed near enough to paint it. In 1990, months after the Wall opened, 118 artists from 21 countries were invited to paint it. The result was the East Side Gallery: around 1,316 metres long, the longest surviving stretch of the Wall, and often called the largest open-air gallery in the world. Exuberant, naïve, angry, funny... it is the voice of that strange year when everything suddenly seemed possible, painted by people who could hardly believe they were allowed to touch the thing at all. Weather, exhaust fumes and souvenir hunters chipped away at it, and in 2009 most of the artists came back to repaint their works from scratch, which annoyed a few purists. In 2013 crowds gathered to protest when sections were moved to open access to a new apartment tower on the riverbank; even David Hasselhoff turned up. The Wall that once divided the city had become something Berliners fought to keep. Walk along it slowly towards the river bridge, reading the slabs as you go, the way you would turn the pages of a book. Somewhere ahead of you, two old men are kissing, and they are the most famous couple in Berlin.