The East Side Gallery

1.3 kilometres, free, no tickets, open always. The longest surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall, running along the Spree in Friedrichshain, covered in murals painted from 1990 onwards by artists from around the world.

Which Side You Are Looking At

The detail that reframes the visit: this is the rear wall — the side that faced East Berlin. The murals were painted after the border opened, onto the surface that East Berliners could never have approached.

The famous Western graffiti, layered on for decades, was on the other wall, most of which is gone. So the East Side Gallery is not the graffitied Wall of the Cold War photographs. It is a post-1989 artwork on a Cold War object, which is a different and still interesting thing.

What to Expect

• Busy. It is one of Berlin’s most-visited free sights.
• Not a memorial. There is no solemnity here and it is not the place to understand the division — go to Bernauer Strasse for that.
• Repainted. Many murals have been restored, some more than once, and tagging over them is a constant argument in the city.
• The Oberbaumbrücke at the eastern end is one of Berlin’s best bridges and was itself a crossing point.

The Famous One

The mural everyone photographs — the Brezhnev–Honecker kiss, My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love by Dmitri Vrubel — is roughly in the middle. Expect a queue of people waiting to stand in front of it.

Doing It Well

Go late in the day: the light comes round onto the painted face and the crowds thin. Walk it from Ostbahnhof to the Oberbaumbrücke and finish on the bridge. Allow 45 minutes to an hour for the full length at a reading pace.

Guided tours that include it run from $29 and are worth it mainly for the Wall context either side of the gallery rather than for the murals, which speak for themselves.

See tours including the gallery →