The Berlin Wall is a tourist attraction that deserves renovation

Berlin - The Berlin Wall remains a tourist attraction even twenty years after its fall. In the German capital, only remnants of it remain. The longest segment, the 1,300-meter-long East Side Gallery, has received a new look in recent months. Artists from around the world have painted nearly a hundred creations on the concrete segments. Other places that reminisce about the former division of the city are also worth a visit.
    The original paintings of the East Side Gallery were created in 1990, but over the past 19 years, the colors have somewhat faded or tourists have "added to" the images, and some even "chiseled out" pieces of colorful concrete. The guardians of the protected monument near the largest East Berlin station, Ostbahnhof, therefore decided to renovate the open-air gallery.
    They contacted most of the 118 artists from 21 countries who had contributed to the original appearance of the East Side Gallery. It has reportedly become the second most visited monument in Berlin after the Brandenburg Gate. After months of restoration, it was finished just in time for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9.
    Former Czechoslovakia is represented by Slovak Andrej Smolák, who restored the motif of a barred hand connected by a chain with a dove. However, the most famous scenes from the East Side Gallery are the iconic "Fraternal Kiss" of communist leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker by Russian symbolist Dmitry Vrubel and the Trabant breaking through the light blue wall by former East German Birgit Kinder.
    In recent weeks, crowds of tourists with cameras and camcorders have once again sought out the paintings. Ninety percent of the visitors to the East Side Gallery are foreigners. "Most of them want to not only see the wall but especially touch it," says one of the gallery's coordinators, Cornelia Kralisch.
    A much lesser-known piece of artistically processed Berlin Wall is located off the tourist routes, near the modern parliamentary building, Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus. In the former border zone, amidst trees and flower beds, there lies a piece of the wall that is painted and described in black and white. The installation "Parliament of Trees", designed by artist Ben Wargin, serves as a memorial to more than 130 "victims of the wall".
    Graffiti enthusiasts particularly favor the more recognizable 30-meter-long section of the wall in the public park Mauerpark in the Prenzlauer Berg district.
    Conversely, around the skyscrapers of central Potsdamer Platz, which symbolizes the city's revival over the past 20 years, there is nothing left of the former wall except for a few loosely erected segments. One of them stands at a memorial site where the former barrier was first opened in November 1989.
    Today, tourists can only shake their heads in disbelief that the concrete rampart really could have led through places marked on the sidewalks and asphalt roads by double rows of recessed cobblestones. In some places, the line is interrupted by new buildings that have filled in what was previously a nearly barren plain.
    From the Berlin Wall, which once stretched 160 kilometers, little remains otherwise. Most of the 45,000 segments were crushed into small pieces, some were transported to other cities and even abroad, where they serve as quirky decorations in restaurants, for example.
    For the 7.5 million tourists who visit Berlin each year, searching for remnants or at least traces of the former wall is a unique adventure. "In many places, even the Berliners themselves no longer remember where it used to run," noted Berlin urban planner and architect Christoph Wessling.
    The most authentic, roughly two-hundred-meter section of the original "anti-fascist protective rampart", as the wall was labeled by East German communist propaganda, is located between the exhibition building Martin-Gropius-Bau and today's Ministry of Finance.
    Even more of the wall remains at Bernauer Strasse, where the Berlin Wall Memorial has been established with a display of the complete fortification system. The border along the street was at times formed directly by the walls of the apartment buildings, and the memorial reminds us that people jumped from windows directly into the West. Some of them lost their lives while doing so.
    In Berlin, not only the remains of the concrete barrier are worth seeing, but also the three preserved watchtowers belonging to the former fortifications. One such facility is located near today's Main Train Station and serves as a memorial to Günter Litfin, who became the first victim of shooting at the then just 11-day-old Berlin Wall on August 24, 1961. Twenty-four-year-old Litfin tried to swim to the West across the nearby Humboldt Canal.
    "With each group I tell my story to, I take revenge on this terrible system," says the younger brother of the victim, Jürgen Litfin, who established the memorial in 2003 with his own funds.