BERLIN
Stroke by stroke, Gerhard Kriedner applies pink acrylic paint with a small brush on a 14-yard stretch of the Berlin Wall, re-creating the mural he first painted months after the wall came down on Nov. 9, 1989.
Mr. Kriedner and 90 artists from around the world have gathered again to repaint their original creations on the concrete slabs, bringing new life to images that have been eroded by the elements over the past two decades on the longest remaining length of the wall that once split Germany’s capital.
“This is a very emotional thing for me,” Mr. Kriedner, 69, says, adding that he escaped from communist East Germany to the West as a young man. “The Berlin Wall stands for the total lack of freedom we had at the time.”
While Berliners initially were eager to tear down the city’s most detested symbol, there has been a major effort in recent months to restore the three-quarters-of-a-mile-long dilapidated East Side Gallery - a major tourist attraction with 106 paintings and graffiti.
“The wall was rotten through and through,” Mr. Kriedner says on a recent chilly, overcast autumn day as he puts the finishing touches on his mural - a dark, barren landscape with bursting soap bubbles colored pink and light blue, his interpretation of the promise of socialist dreams colliding with reality.
“In order to restore the wall, the entire artwork was scraped off, the concrete was chiseled down to the steel insides, and then everything had to be reapplied, but this time with waterproof acrylic paints,” the Bavarian artist says, adding that he is working off a photo of his original piece to be sure the new version mimicks the original.
Kani Alavi, the head of the East Side Gallery’s Artists Association, has been the driving force behind the restoration work, which started in October 2008. Mr. Alavi lobbied for years to collect the $3.7 million from the city, state and federal governments needed for the restoration process. That included room and board for the artists, who otherwise work for free.
Of the initial group of artists, just five declined to participate in the renovation project. Six others have died, and their murals have been restored by other artists.
“We thought it was really important to re-create the paintings because, by now, there’s a whole new generation that no longer remembers the original Berlin Wall and the historic events that led to Germany’s reunification,” says Mr. Alavi, an Iranian-born artist who already has restored his own mural of East Germans crossing Checkpoint Charlie into West Berlin on the night the border opened for the first time.
Every day, the East Side Gallery in Berlin’s formerly eastern Friedrichshain neighborhood attracts thousands of tourists who pose for snapshots in front of the murals.
The western side of the wall was covered in graffiti during the decades after the barrier was erected on Aug. 13, 1961. The eastern side stood barren, desolate and guarded by stern border police for decades. Only after the wall’s collapse did a group of Berlin artists decide to decorate the stretch - the first joint art project of the formerly divided city.
They called on artists from around the world to join them in expressing their feelings in paint and color on the formerly untouchable east side of the wall.
“We had nothing, only cheap paint and brushes, but we were so euphoric about all the historic changes and we wanted to express them in our paintings,” Mr. Alavi says, adding that the murals show the joy and hopefulness of people’s belief at the time in overcoming the injustice.
Since then, pollution, weather and time have turned famous images like the fraternal communist kiss between East German leader Erich Honecker and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, or the East German Trabant car that appears to be bursting through the wall, into a sad sight - with long cracks in the concrete and big chunks of paint flaking off.
Then there were the souvenir seekers who chipped off pieces of rock or scrawled their names and messages atop the paintings.
The East Side Gallery received historic-monument status in 1991. Yet despite new signs asking visitors not to tamper with the bright new paintings, it’s uncertain whether the new art will be free from graffiti, vandalism or souvenir-hunting.
Some, however, don’t seem to mind that prospect.
Julie Zinser, a tourist from Riverside, Calif., strolling along the wall says she loves the paintings, but the bright new colors make them look less authentic.
“It seems like the gritty beauty of this city got a little lost,” Miss Zinser says before posing for a photo with her two daughters.
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