Berlin Wall
— — the morning the city was one place again.
Not only on a wall.
“The longest surviving stretch runs along the Spree at Mühlenstraße — 1.3 kilometres of concrete that once divided a city, now painted end to end. The river is on one side, the road on the other, and the wall holds the middle. People walk it slowly. Most stop at the Trabant breaking through, or the kiss. Nobody hurries past.
Berlin Wall, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Wall ran for 155 kilometres around West Berlin from 13 August 1961 to 9 November 1989, with 43 kilometres cutting directly through the city. The longest surviving stretch is the East Side Gallery, 1,316 metres along Mühlenstraße in Friedrichshain, where the inner wall meets the Spree. After the fall, 118 artists from 21 countries painted the eastern face in 1990, including Dmitri Vrubel's Fraternal Kiss and Birgit Kinder's Test the Best. The German government listed it as a protected memorial in 1991 and restored the paintings in 2009. The Brandenburg Gate sits roughly four kilometres west.
The Wall was built in two parallel runs of L-shaped reinforced concrete segments, each 3.6 metres high and 1.2 metres wide, separated by the guarded strip the East German border guards called the death strip. The outer face, the one West Berliners saw, was painted illicitly through the 1980s. The eastern face — the painted face today — was kept blank until November 1989. Keith Haring painted a 100-metre section near Checkpoint Charlie in 1986; that stretch is gone. The East Side Gallery survives because it still stands.
The East Side Gallery is open day and night, free, never closed. The Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse, three kilometres north, preserves an intact 70-metre section with the original guard tower and a documentation centre open Tuesday through Sunday. Checkpoint Charlie, the famous Allied crossing on Friedrichstrasse, is now a tourist intersection with a replica guardhouse. The Berliner Mauerweg, a 160-kilometre walking and cycling path, follows the entire former border around the western half of the city. The S-Bahn Ostbahnhof drops you at the East Side Gallery.