Murals preserve Cold War history

David Crossland

• Last Updated: November 03. 2009 9:34PM UAE / November 3. 2009 5:34PM GMT

Artists who have restored 106 murals on the longest surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall in time for the 20th anniversary of its fall have warned the city to take better care of its Cold War legacy.

The 1.3km “East Side Gallery” has been one of Berlin’s main tourist attractions since artists from around the world began painting the grey concrete in January 1990. That was just three months after the dramatic night of November 9, 1989, when the East German government stunned the world by opening its border with West Germany, thereby sealing the downfall of communism in Europe.

Although the western side of the Wall had been covered with graffiti for decades, the eastern side was bare because East German authorities strictly forbade their citizens to go anywhere near it with a paint brush or spray can.

Over the years, many of the bold, colourful murals on this impromptu open-air gallery have been ruined by graffiti sprayers, bad weather and tourists chipping away pieces of the historic concrete for souvenirs.

Since April, 98 artists have returned to Berlin to re-create their work under a publicly funded programme to restore one of the few remaining portions of the Wall before the anniversary, which will be attended by world leaders in Berlin’s biggest public ceremony since German unification in 1990.

One of the most popular paintings, by the Russian artist Dmitri Vubel, was inspired by the famous 1979 photograph by the French press photographer Régis Bossu showing the then Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev kissing the East German leader Erich Honecker on the lips.

Another favourite shows East Germany’s national car, the box-like Trabant, smashing through the Wall.

One particularly colourful and intricate mural, Hymn to Joy, by the Italian artist Fulvio Pinna, depicts a siren floating above the world and leaving the Nazi and communist dictatorships behind her. Most of the murals interpret freedom.

“It’s a shame so much of the Wall has gone,” Pinna said as he put the finishing touches to the work he first painted in early 1990. “They tried to make it all disappear, just like someone who’s done something bad tries to get rid of it as quickly as possible.

“But we must not be ashamed of what happened. The important thing is that we don’t forget, and that we don’t let it happen again. We have to evolve. Communism and the whole state apparatus was a huge monster.”

The East Side Gallery runs along the Spree River and is well outside the centre of Berlin. Scarcely any of the 166km Wall has been left in the heart of the city, apart from a few short, crumbling stretches in side streets and some isolated concrete slabs re-erected in recent years.

Tourists regularly complain that they cannot find the Wall, the most potent symbol of Europe’s division and of the Cold War between 1961 and 1989. At least 136 people were killed trying to cross it, according to the latest research.

“What gives the paintings their significance is the message of freedom they convey in combination with the Wall,” Pinna said.

He recalled walking past East German border guards each morning as he worked on his Hymn to Joy in those early weeks of 1990. The East German state existed until October 3 of that year, when it was integrated into the Federal Republic of Germany and vanished.

“I got to know the guards and would have a joke with them as I walked through the crossing. It was unbelievable to me that only a few months earlier they would have opened fire. What crazy games go on in the minds of people?”

After 1989, Berlin had understandably been in a hurry to rid itself of the ugly, deadly structure that had divided it for so long. The scars were so fresh it took Berlin years to realise the importance of preserving some of it. In 1996, the city even wanted to tear down the East Side Gallery. Kani Alavi, an Iranian-born artist who took part in painting it, formed a pressure group and managed to stop the plan.

“If we don’t start protecting the few pieces we have left, we won’t be able to keep them as authentic historical evidence,” Alavi, who moved to West Berlin in 1980, said. “Future generations may not believe what happened here, and we will become vulnerable to people sowing doubt about history, like Ahmadinejad who denies the Holocaust.” The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has called the genocide of six million Jews by Nazi Germany a lie.

Alavi said the murals themselves now constituted a historical monument. “The ideas and all the euphoria of that era were reflected by artists from different cultures on this cold concrete. The city has an obligation to protect the paintings that these artists spent so long creating. It’s not giving us enough recognition. We can’t keep coming back here to restore them.”

He has demanded that the city hire security guards, install floodlights and forbid parking on the busy road that runs along the East Side Gallery. “People should respect the paintings the way they would in a museum.”

So far, the city has not met those demands. But it did help finance the €2.2 million (Dh12m) repainting programme, which included structural repairs to that part of the Wall, paying each artist €3,000 and covering expenses and materials.

In another sign that Berliners are waking up to the need to remember their division, the main Wall memorial site on Bernauer Strasse, an area where several people died jumping from their apartments to reach the West, recently announced plans to rebuild a watchtower in its original location. Only six of the 300 watchtowers are still standing.

Most of the 136 people who died trying to cross the Wall were easterners shot dead by border guards. Of those, more than half were killed in the first five years of its construction in 1961. In addition, at least 251 people died after being subjected to controls while crossing the border. Most of them were elderly people who suffered heart attacks.

Berlin plans a host of events to mark the anniversary. Tomorrow, U2, the Irish rock band, will hold a free concert in front of the Brandenburg Gate, which stood just behind the Wall in East Berlin and symbolised the division and unification.

The festivities will culminate on Monday with an open-air festival and firework display at the gate. Lech Walesa, the former leader of Poland’s Solidarity trade union, which spearheaded the struggle for freedom, will push over the first of 1,000 domino stones, each 2.5m high and stretching for 1.5km along the route of the vanished Wall, through the rebuilt, elegant and bustling centre of the German capital. The stones symbolise the chain reaction of events that led up to and followed the night that changed the world two decades ago.


foreign.desk@thenational.ae