East Side Gallery

When the Wall fell in November 1989, most of it was chipped, bulldozed and sold within a year. One 1.3-kilometre stretch along the Spree survived by becoming art: in early 1990, 118 artists from 21 countries painted the eastern face — the side no East Berliner had ever been allowed to approach — turning the border strip into the world's longest open-air gallery before anyone could demolish it. It's been listed, restored and argued over ever since, which is very Berlin.

The two icons pull the crowds. Dmitri Vrubel's "My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love" — Brezhnev and Honecker locked in the fraternal socialist kiss, painted from a real 1979 press photo — and Birgit Kinder's Trabant bursting through the concrete, licence plate reading NOV·9·89. Around them run a hundred more works of 1990's raw optimism and dread, best read walking east from the Oberbaumbrücke — Berlin's prettiest bridge, all brick turrets — with the Spree on one side and Friedrichshain waking up on the other.

For the history under the paint, The Wall Museum at the gallery's eastern end (Mühlenstraße 78–80) stacks 13 rooms of original footage — construction night 1961, the tunnel escapes, the shoot-to-kill order, the bewildered press conference that opened the border by accident — onto floor-to-ceiling screens. It's compact, visceral, and the right 90 minutes before or after walking the paintings; the combination is the best Wall experience in the city now that Checkpoint Charlie has fully surrendered to kitsch.

Go at 8 AM for empty photographs or golden hour for warm light on the concrete; midday brings coach groups shoulder-to-shoulder at the Kiss. The gallery is free, always open, and unfenced — it's a street, which is the point. Warschauer Straße station (S+U) drops you at the east end; finish at the west end and you're a bridge away from Kreuzberg dinner.