The Berlin Wall

A couple of weeks ago I uttered the phrase, “it would be like talking to a brick wall”. I meant it to mean exactly what the expression is commonly understood to mean – a communication that has broken down because one person or party has ceased to communicate while another person or party still has a message to convey. But not all walls are silent (stay with me here!)

The longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall – the East Side Gallery stretching 1.3 kilometres – is being given a fresh lick of paint. As part of a 2.5 million euro project funded by the Berlin Senate, the federal government and lottery money, the 118 artists who created murals along the wall following its collapse in November 1989 have been invited back. The old murals covered with graffiti (like the one taken on my mobile phone) are being stripped and then repainted.

The wall has a double-edged magnetism because some of the visitors who stop to admire the murals feel compelled to write on them too. No one stops them. I just hope, when the revamp in preparation for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is finished, that the authorities won’t think it necessary to put a barrier all along the wall to stop people getting close to it. That would be too terrible an irony.