East Side Gallery

This is the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall — 1,316 metres of concrete that nobody wanted to preserve until 118 artists from 21 countries painted it in 1990, turning a symbol of oppression into the world's largest open-air gallery.

The most famous image is Dmitri Vrubel's 'My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love' — the painting of Brezhnev and Honecker kissing. It's based on a real photograph taken during the thirtieth anniversary of the German Democratic Republic in 1979. The actual kiss was a standard socialist fraternal greeting, but Vrubel's version makes it look like desperate passion. He painted it in 1990, and when it deteriorated, he repainted it in 2009 — controversially, because many artists refused to repaint their originals.

What most people don't realise is that this was the east-facing side of the wall. East Berliners never saw these paintings — they faced West Berlin. The side that East Germans saw was just grey concrete. The death strip, guard towers, and tripwires were between them and this wall. So these paintings were made on a surface that, for twenty-eight years, nobody on one side was allowed to approach.

The wall itself is only about 3.6 metres tall. People who've never seen it in person are often surprised by how modest it looks. The wall's power was never in its height — it was in the orders to shoot anyone who tried to cross it.