East Side Gallery

After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, this stretch running along the Spree between Ostbahnhof and the Oberbaum Bridge — the longest continuous section of the Wall left standing anywhere in the city — was handed over to artists rather than demolished. In spring 1990, 118 painters from 21 countries covered roughly 1.3 kilometres of the former border with murals responding directly to the political upheaval they'd just lived through, turning a structure built to kill people trying to cross it into what remains the world's longest open-air gallery.

The single most recognisable image is Dmitri Vrubel's "My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love," widely known as the "Fraternal Kiss" — a painted recreation of a genuine 1979 photograph of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev kissing East German leader Erich Honecker, rendered with a satirical bite that would have been unthinkable to display publicly before 1989. Alongside it, dozens of other murals tackle themes of freedom, division and hope with wildly varying styles and levels of political directness.