Last stretch of Berlin Wall gets facelift

EAST GERMAN leader Erich Honecker famously proclaimed in 1989 that the Berlin Wall could remain in place for another 100 years.

It turns out that his faith in East German construction was almost as off the mark as his political instincts. The wall opened for traffic a few months after Honecker spoke. And now the remaining pieces are crumbling physically.

Yesterday, some 19 years after the barrier was opened, restoration work began on the longest remaining stretch, which has been ravaged by age and damaged by vandals and trophy hunters.

The 1.3km stretch, known as the East Side Gallery, snakes along the Spree River in Berlin’s Friedrichshain neighborhood.

In 1990, 118 international artists covered it with elaborate graffiti at the city’s invitation.

The sight recalls the wall’s western side during the Cold War, which was covered with graffiti during the decades after the barrier was erected on August 13, 1961. Parts of the eastern side, to which the East Side Gallery belongs, were painted only after communism collapsed.

Today, the stretch of wall attracts droves of tourists, who pose for snapshots in front of the murals — famous images such as the fraternal communist kiss between Honecker and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, or the East German Trabant car that appears to be bursting through the wall.

In addition to the crumbling concrete, the murals have seen better days, as pollution, rain and graffiti have turned them into a sad, flaking sight.

The approximately €2.2 million restoration project will see much of the original concrete removed and replaced with better-quality materials, and then finished with a surface that will better keep the artwork from peeling off.

More than 20 of the original artists were at a kickoff ceremony Wednesday, and the East Side Gallery’s Artists’ Association is already in contact with around four-fifths of the 118 involved in the 1990 project, said the association’s leader, Kani Alavi.

Though the original art will have to be removed for the restoration of the concrete, the hope is to have the artists repaint the wall exactly as it was in time for November 9, 2009, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall.

“It must be authentic,” said Alavi, an Iranian-born artist who in 1990 painted the East Side Gallery mural of East Germans crossing into West Berlin called “Es geschah im November” or “It happened in November.”