Update: Berlin’s East Side Gallery

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The vanishing Berlin Wall

The rise and fall of Berlin's East Side Gallery

Considering just how historical this Berlin landmark is, it’s amazing how much it has been neglected. Most efforts to preserve and renovate the East Side Gallery section of the Berlin Wall have run into a brick wall of property rights litigation, pollution clean-up, and a lack of funding.

This bizarre image of osculating communists at the East Side Gallery is one of the art works suffering the ill effects of neglect and the elements—not to mention less talented graffiti artists. PHOTO © Hyde Flippo > More Wall Photos

Thanks only to an artistic accident of history, the East Side Gallery is one of the few surviving pieces of the Wall still standing and relatively intact. Located along the banks of the Spree River in Friedrichshain near the Ostbahnhof (east railway station), the best-known Wall remnant and its artwork have fallen on hard times. Despite a partial restoration in 2000, vandals, time, and the elements have combined to make the eastern Berlin landmark a somewhat depressing sight today. Created in 1990 in celebration of the Wall’s collapse, the Gallery features works by an international group of artists who expressed their reactions to the November 9, 1989 event in paintings that cover the half-mile long section of the Wall that has come to be known as the East Side Gallery.

One of the most bizarre and ubiquitous images (once seeming to adorn half the souvenir T-shirts sold in Berlin) is that of fellow communists Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev kissing each other on the mouth (see photo above). That original work and the many other East Side Gallery efforts are in danger of disappearing beneath far less artistic graffiti or fading from years of exposure to Berlin's weather. (See what has already happened to this classic work on our Then and Now Photos page.) The strip of land facing the other, graffiti-strewn, side of the Wall has become a home to derelicts and drug addicts. Even a murder victim was literally uncovered during a clean-up project a few years back.

The hopes that were raised back in 1996 when a heap of old cars and junk was removed from the area between the Wall and the Spree sank into a bureaucratic and legal quagmire. Although the East Side Gallery property now belongs to the German government, once it is released for development, any former land owners would then have the legal right to come forward with their claims. This is not encouraging to any prospective investor.

This is the other, less attractive if not less interesting, side of the East Side Gallery. The area between this section of the old Berlin Wall and the Spree River has become an eyesore and an environmental problem. PHOTO © Hyde Flippo  > More Wall Photos

It’s hard to believe that there were once grand plans for a park and a residential complex at this site. A 1993 architectural contest for its design was won by the German-American architect Helmut Jahn. His plan called for the East Side Gallery to be integrated into the park’s design. Now, the project seems more like some city-planning fantasy.

It would be unfortunate if the historic East Side Gallery itself becomes yet another victim of Berlin’s history.

The 2000 Restoration

A project to restore about one-third of the East Side Gallery was completed in the summer of 2000. As you can see in our Berlin Wall Photos, the remaining two-thirds of this Wall section continues to deteriorate.

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Germany > BERLIN > Airlift > East Side Gallery > Berlin Photos/Links

Web page Copyright © 1997-2005 Hyde Flippo

Related Pages - Berlin

THIS SITE

• Berlin Airlift - Die Luftbrücke 1948-1949
• Berlin Photo Gallery 1 - Berlin baut um - Images of Berlin under construction in the 1990s
• Berlin Photo Gallery 2 - Berlin 2000 - Photos taken in the summer of 2000
• Berlin - Historic Views of the Wall from the late 1960s
• Berlin Web Links - The German capital on the Web
• Recommended Reading - Selected travel books, some related directly to Berlin
• Our Expat page offers links of interest to those now living or planning to live in the German-speaking world.

THE WALL ON THE WEB

• Berlin Photos - Fotogalerie from German @ About.com
• The Berlin Wall by Heiko Burkhardt. A good site with information and links concerning the vanishing Wall and its history.
• The East Side Gallery - This half-mile section (1 km) at Mühlenstrasse is the longest remaining part of the vanishing Wall.
• The Wall Today - Places where the Wall can still be found... so far.
• The Berlin Wall - In English, German and French. From the Deutsches Historisches Museum. Features “A Concrete Curtain - The Life and Death of the Berlin Wall” in English.
• Die Berliner Mauer und der Potsdamer Platz - in German.
• The Berlin Wall Falls by Stefan Drebler. In English and German. With guided tour.
• Chris DeWitt's Berlin Wall Home Page - The 8th edition of this excellent site has a new URL.
• East Berlin - A Virtual Tour in English and German. “Meet East and West in one city.”
• The House at the Bridge: A Story of Modern Germany is a Web site and a book by Katie Hafner. “A 19th-century villa stands mere meters from the Berlin Wall and the Glienicke Bridge - the 'Bridge of Spies'.”
• NBC - Time & Again - Berlin Wall - NBC's look at the Wall and their coverage of its opening in 1989.

Berlin Newspapers (in German)

• Berliner Morgenpost
• Berliner Zeitung
• Die Tageszeitung (taz)
• Der Tagesspiegel

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