The story of this place
When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, a 1.3-kilometre stretch along the Spree River in Friedrichshain was left standing. In 1990, 118 artists from 21 countries turned its eastern face into the world's largest open-air gallery — an act of jubilant defiance on the very concrete that had killed escapees. Dmitri Vrubel painted the notorious 'Fraternal Kiss' between Brezhnev and Honecker; Birgit Kinder's Trabant car appears to burst through the wall. The paintings decay and are periodically restored. The stretch is a listed monument, and each mural is a fossil of the euphoria of 1989–90.