It’s essentially an art gallery. But in this gallery the paintings aren’t hanging on the wall, they’re painted on it. And the gallery is outside on a busy sidewalk of an equally busy road. Sounds unlikely? Well, read on…
I’d imagine that most people will at least have heard of the Berlin Wall – the wall that divided West and East Germany for almost 45 years until it was torn down in 1989. Naturally, with our interest in history, it was inevitable that Craig and I would seek out some of the remaining fragments of the wall while we were in Berlin.
That was how we landed up at the East Side Gallery – the largest remaining piece of the Berlin Wall. I’m not really sure what I was expecting to find when we got there but it certainly wasn’t an array of brightly coloured art, and a highly festive atmosphere from buskers, entertainers and a multitude of tourists and German people basking in the sunshine of the early summer’s day.
The East Side Gallery is an open-air section of the infamous Berlin Wall that’s been turned into a brightly coloured mural of artworks. It’s 1316 m long and runs along the East German side of the wall on Mühlenstraße in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, Berlin. It’s an official heritage site and is visited by over 3 million people each year.
What really caught my interest was the vibrancy of the experience of walking along the wall and drinking in the almost festive air of the place itself. The East Side Gallery is full of people – from tourists like ourselves wanting to experience the site, to locals also keen to soak up the atmosphere and remind themselves of the fairly recent past of their city and, of course, to buskers of all types who entertain the passersby hoping for a contribution in acknowledgement of their art.
As we walked along listening to the buskers and, in Craig’s case, photographing the artwork we happened upon the Berlin Wall East Side Gallery Museum, which is a small but richly diverse museum detailing the history of the Wall. I was amazed at the number of exhibits they had chronicling the development of the Berlin Wall from the initial split, through the building of the Wall and the results thereof, right the way through to the reunification of Germany and how this news was received by leaders from around the world. They even have a room dedicated to the place of the Berlin Wall in popular culture, including a video of Pink Floyd’s The Wall concert that took place in July 1990, a few short months after the fall of the Wall.
Perhaps the most profoundly affecting exhibit in the Wall Museum for me was the video interview with a Soviet officer, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov telling the story of how a faulty reading from a Soviet satellite warning system on 26 September 1983 almost led to all out nuclear war. If he had reported the satellite sighting to his superiors it would almost certainly have resulted in a retaliatory strike on American and NATO targets and a full scale nuclear war. Thankfully, Petrov had sufficient concern about the veracity of the report that he chose not to contact his superiors. I can’t even begin to imagine how different a world we would be living in had he sent that report. It’s enough to give one the shivers!
If you’d like to learn more about the 1983 Missile Incident, here’s a link to an article on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
While the East Side Gallery is completely accessible, with wide pavements and no steps, sadly the Wall Museum might prove more of a challenge to someone with a mobility impairment. It’s on the third floor of a building and I didn’t see an elevator – but maybe there was one hiding somewhere amongst the exhibits, so it’s probably worth checking out for yourself if you’re interested in visiting and have a mobility impairment.
