East Side Gallery: Painted on the Back of the Border

The East Side Gallery is painted on the back of the border. The long stretch of Berlin Wall on Mühlenstrasse was an inner wall, built smooth and tidy to face East Berlin, and nobody on the eastern side was allowed to touch it. The real border was the river behind it. Roamer's walk reads the gallery in that order: first behind the wall, in the old border strip by the Spree, then along its painted front, which has been painted twice, and finally over a towered gate bridge that was rebuilt too. Nine stops, about one and a half kilometers.

Why this side faced east

At about 1.3 kilometers, this is the longest stretch of the Wall still standing. Its position explains its look. Here the whole width of the Spree belonged to East Berlin, and the sector border ran along the Kreuzberg bank opposite. So no outer wall was built on this stretch. The river took its place, and the strip behind the inner wall held only security fences, as Berlin's heritage office notes.

The wall itself was chosen for appearances. Mühlenstrasse was a protocol route, used by high-ranking visitors to East Germany, so the inner wall here was built from the smooth 3.5 meter elements of the Border Wall 75 type, the slabs that usually faced West Berlin. On this street they faced east, so the route looked neat. Near the Stralauer Platz end survives something rougher: a piece of first-generation wall from 1961, a factory wall raised with hollow blocks and set with glass shards.

Start the walk behind the wall, in the park by the river, and you are standing in the strip itself. Buildings on the bank were removed through the 1970s to give the guards a clear view and line of fire. People who tried to cross the Spree to the West Berlin bank were shot, or died of cold or exhaustion. The promenade along the water follows the paths where the border troops served.

A gallery painted twice

The painting began with an idea in November 1989 from a West Berliner, David Monty, and an East Berliner, Heike Stephan, and a permit from the East German Ministry of National Defence. The heritage office counts 118 artists from 21 countries and 106 pictures. The gallery opened on 28 September 1990 and has been a listed monument since November 1991.

What you see today, though, is mostly a second painting. The first works went onto unprimed concrete, and they weathered quickly. In 2008 and 2009 the paintings were sandblasted off, the concrete repaired and primed, and the gallery repainted: 82 artists repainted their own works, 17 were copied by other gallery artists, and 5 artists refused. One mural, Hands by Margaret Hunter and Peter Russell, is the only one whose 1990 paint is conserved rather than repainted.

Look for the artists who knew this wall from the other side. Thierry Noir, born in Lyon, had been painting cartoon heads on the western face of the Wall in Kreuzberg since 1984, and in his own account the eastern face had stayed gray because West Berliners could not reach it. Birgit Kinder's Trabant breaking through the Wall was titled Test the Best in 1990 and renamed Test the Rest in 2009. And then there is the picture everyone photographs: Dmitry Vrubel's "My God, help me to survive this deadly love," painted from a press photograph of 5 October 1979 that shows Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker exchanging the socialist fraternal kiss. It was removed in the 2009 restoration, and Vrubel, after first refusing, repainted it himself. So the most famous painting on the Wall is a copy of a photograph, painted twice.

Beside it stands a small building with a story of its own: the gatehouse at Mühlenstrasse 73, built into the wall in 1977 and used by border guards and police. After 1990 it was a souvenir kiosk for some thirty years. The Berlin Wall Foundation restored it, and it opened as the gallery's visitor information point in January 2025.

A gate built twice

The walk ends on the Oberbaumbrücke, the brick bridge with towers that crosses the Spree to Kreuzberg. The name goes back to a wooden bridge of 1724, closed at night with a log, the Oberbaum. The present bridge was built from 1892 to 1896 to designs by Otto Stahn, deliberately dressed as a Gothic town gate, with road and footpaths below and the elevated railway above. Its middle arch was blown up in 1945 and replaced by a lattice girder; the towers were removed in 1967 for fear of collapse. It was restored with a new middle span by 1995. During the division it was a crossing for pedestrians only. Like the gallery behind you, the gate you cross is partly a rebuilding.

On the far side the walk finishes at Schlesisches Tor, an elevated station of 1899 to 1901 in red brick, named for a city gate that stood here until the old customs wall came down in the 1860s.

Walking it

The route is flat and free, on park paths and sidewalks, and it touches on deaths at the border. Walk it at your own pace and in your own order of attention: the stops are short, and the paintings reward lingering wherever one catches you. Painting or writing on the gallery is illegal, the Berlin Wall Foundation says, so look, do not add.

The walk is East Side Gallery: The Side Nobody Could Touch, nine stops from the park behind the wall to Schlesisches Tor. For the Wall's other surviving face, see the Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse. See every route on the Berlin page.

Sources

• Stiftung Berliner Mauer, The Berlin Wall on Mühlenstrasse: the protocol route and the 3.5 meter Border Wall 75 elements facing east.
• Stiftung Berliner Mauer, Longest Open-Air Gallery in the World: more than 1.3 kilometers, David Monty and Heike Stephan, the 2008 and 2009 restoration, the gatehouse reopened in January 2025.
• Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Denkmaldatenbank: Berliner Mauer, border wall sections (09040271): the river as the border, the strip with fences only, 118 artists from 21 countries, the listing of 1991.
• Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Denkmaldatenbank: Oberbaumbrücke (09095168): Otto Stahn's bridge of 1892 to 1896, the 1945 demolition, the towers removed in 1967, the rebuilding.
• Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Denkmaldatenbank: Hochbahnhof Schlesisches Tor (09031242): the station of 1899 to 1901 and its name.