THE FRATERNAL KISS
THE STORY BEHIND THE BERLIN WALL’S MOST ICONIC MURAL GERMANY, 1990
From February to September 1990, over 118 artists from around the world were invited to Berlin to paint the east side of the Wall. Flocking to the city, the artists adorned the Wall with more than 100 murals that not only commented on the recent political changes but celebrated them, with both the division of Germany and the Cold War in Europe finally coming to an end.
The murals of the East Side Gallery, the longest stretch of the Wall to remain standing today, serve as a symbol of democracy, peace and unity, attracting millions of tourists every year. Some of the most popular images of the Gallery include Birgit Kinder’s ‘Test the Rest’ (formerly called ‘Test the Best’), which features an East German Trabant car breaking through the Wall, and Kani Alavi’s ‘It Happened in November’, which shows thousands of East Germans flooding through to West Berlin when the Wall fell.
However, the most famous mural is a depiction of Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, and Erich Honecker, the General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, kissing during the 30th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the German Democratic Republic in 1979. Painted by Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel, the mural is a reproduction of a photograph taken by French photographer Régis Bossu that was widely republished across the globe. This socialist fraternal kiss was a form of greeting in socialist states that traditionally involved kissing on the cheeks, although a kiss on the mouth reflected the closeness of the Communist leaders. There was no homosexual desire behind it.
In November 1991, the Gallery was declared a national monument and five years later, efforts were made to preserve the murals after they started to deteriorate. Controversially, they were removed in 2009 so that sections of the Wall damaged by vandalism and exposure to the weather could be repaired. The decision angered many of the original artists and although they were invited to repaint their murals, eight of them refused. Nevertheless, the remaining artists – including Vrubel – did agree to recreate them but the fight for preservation continues in the face of increasing construction work in Berlin.