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| “Yo soy Señor Papier-Maché, gringo.” |
The thing about visiting Berlin as a tourist is that you are constantly treading the fine line between the two types of tourist that swarm around this city in their multitudes: the typical doughy, shorts-wearing people who take constant streams of photos and simply have to see anything that is to do with Berlin, Germany and (regrettably) the Holocaust, and the lithe, toothy young things who search out only the ‘realest’ and grittiest things Berlin has to offer. Thanks to these two groups the city is a whirlwind of awful baseball caps and neon colours, plastic souvenir TV-Towers and entire spectrums of plimsoll shoes. Each group looks down on the other; the ‘touris’ spurn the hipsters because they’re either drunk or stupid-looking, and the groovy youths are disgusted by the touris because they enjoy normal things that normal people enjoy.
The touris are happily occupied meandering around the Reichstag dome or having money painfully surgically extracted in the TV Tower, but the American Appareltroopers are busy looking for something more wild, and they usually end up at the Kunsthaus Tacheles. Homeplace of the brilliant loo-roll-and-PVA-glue hombres you see above, the Kunsthaus Tacheles is an abandoned and reclaimed old shopping centre which was overtaken by bunches of artists who filled the entire building with mental art, clanging music and the stench of urine. Within the building one follows two scarily dark, winding staircases through the echoing blasts of weird music into little rooms with mini-exhibitions, some fantastic and some just plain unnerving. There is jewellery to buy and deranged bald men wearing bowler hats to avoid making eye contact with. It’s the wrecked and beautiful building that made the scene in Goodbye Lenin where (sigh) Daniel Bruhl and the attractive nurse sit on the edge of a dewalled room and talk about their feelings and stuff. There are clubs and bars and artists’ workshops, and it’s brilliant and terrifying and exciting, and most tragically of all, it’s all about to go away forever because the artists have finally lost the house to people who want to use the location for a new shopping centre, something which Berlin clearly desperately needs. There are pots everywhere begging for donations to keep the place going and if you ask me, despite the urine-funk it’s worth it.
Thus the two tribes of tourists fail to annoy each other most of the time and save their annoyingness to get on the nerves of people who have the good fortune to live here. They rarely have a chance to mingle because there are few things in the city that appeal to both at the same time.
Until you get to the East Side Gallery.
The East Side Gallery is the longest still-standing stretch of the real Berlin wall in Berlin and features all those famous bits of Wall art that you see in the history books, like the kiss painting or the Trabi bursting through the wall. I had to see it one last time before I left simply because it has such an incredible effect; the very idea of a huge concrete call literally chopping an entire city impermeably in half is fairy-tale villainesque to me, and to be able to walk along it is undeniably impressive. What makes it even better is that when I fist saw the wall in 2008 all this art was hidden under a vile vomitous smear of graffiti by moronic tourists who seemed to think that the art was simply an invitation for them to add their own input in the form of some glib statement about freedom or their girlfriend. In 2009, Berlin decided that it wanted to take back what was rightfully its own expression of freedom and invited all the original artists to come back and repaint what they had originally created; although there is still the occasional “I <3 Chaz 2010” thoughtlessly scratched into the paint the pictures are all now so crisp and colourful they glow in the sun. Along the strip there are a few awesome beach bars where you can sit at the riverside and let the sultry sounds of high-volume club music lull you into a restful afternoon daze.
But the people. Oh, the people. Everyone goes to the East Side Gallery, regardless of genre of tourist, because it is free and genuine and one of the few divided-Berlin artefacts that hasn’t been directly shoved in a museum, and naturally also because it is genuinely great. This means that in walking along the wall you spend your entire time on the verge of anger ducking under the scope of people’s cameras as they take photos of each other high-fiving by the wall or hilariously stroking the chin of Gorbatschow. You might, like I did, have to help a group of tittering English girls have their photo taken sexily posing with a guy dressed as a border control guard against a painted metaphor for the torture of feigned social contentedness. You will have people offering to stamp your passport with a ‘genuine DDR passport control stamp’, or you might even have the chance to buy a genuine fragment of clumsily spray-painted concrete which genuinely looks like a genuine piece of the genuine wall. There are gangs of tourists who inexplicably march along the length of the wall barely registering the thing itself as if it were simply a big long corridor leading to a Schnitzel convention. There are naive tourists who pay a lot of money for the faux border guard to stand by the wall looking serious and properly-DDR even though the man is Turkish with long hair, a beard and multiple piercings. There are tourists who seem to have made some sort of mistake and clearly don’t know where they are or what they are looking at, and are simply standing by the wall having arguments with eachother holding maps.
So do go to the East Side Gallery, please, and do enjoy it before it gets covered in people’s hilarious catchphrases daubed onto the anus of the dove of peace painting; but go before the majority of people are awake.
