Berlin to protect its Wall from vandalism
Print Edition
A quarter-century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin said yesterday it would build a barrier to protect the longest surviving stretch from a sharp rise in vandalism.
The so-called East Side Gallery, a 1.3-kilometer long slab which artists covered with murals months after the Cold War symbol was breached on November 9, 1989, still draws up to 3 million tourists per year.
But souvenir hunters and graffiti sprayers have taken a heavy toll of late, officials told reporters, announcing the erection of a permanent guard barrier.
“We have witnessed in recent weeks and months an unbelievable amount of vandalism,” Sascha Langenbach, a spokesman for the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, told a news conference.
Officials blamed primarily foreign tourists who want to make their mark on a bit of history by scrawling or scratching their names into the Wall’s crumbling concrete, or even chipping away at it. Many immortalize their acts of destruction with a selfie.
“This barrier should make clear that this is a historical monument,” said Adalbert-Maria Klees of the district’s public spaces commission.
The East Side Gallery last month started restoring the Wall and its nearly 100 murals, which were painted between February and September 1990 by artists from around the world.
But Klees said many of the completed pictures had been immediately defaced again, prompting the decision to build the 80-centimeter-tall transparent barrier 1.3 meters from the Wall to keep tourists at a distance.
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