Review: 25 Jahre Mauerfall @ East Side Gallery

The 25th anniversary of the 'Mauerfall' (fall of the Berlin Wall) last Sunday was in some ways similar to the original fall of the wall.  Throngs of people gathered at the old checkpoints, and all along the path of the old political barrier between east and west. It was cold and everyone was tense. But instead of release from the GDR, they were waiting for the release of a f*** ton of glowing balloons that lined the Wall perimeter. 

The release had been meant to happen at 7 p.m. sharp. It was meant to be one of those magical, cathartic moments where everyone would tear up as they looked into the night skies and watched the balloons (which symbolised bricks, apparently) drift away on clouds of helium, dissolving like the Wall itself was meant to do.

But as was usual for any Fall in Berlin, it was drizzly, dark, foggy, and people were lucky if they could see from one side of the Spree to the other.  The tourists throngs seemed enrapt by the display of 'freedom', forming a wall of bodies that made it difficult for me and my friend to get past them. 

Meanwhile, a little ways down from Ostbahnhof, a more organic and enduring kind of freedom was being celebrated. Pumping techno and gluehwein fumes cloaked a crowd that was a lot more adamant and alive. On a small stage, Dr. Motte, founder of the Love Parade, was playing a banging set of 1990s vinyl to a small, diehard crowd of protestors (and a few Berghain-leavers, brandishing Sekt). 

The theme of this party-protest was 'Die Mauer Muss Bleiben' (The Wall Must Stay).  The protest organiser didn't come up with the name out of some perverse sense of rebellion but, rather, because they wanted to make an important point: those who forget history are usually damned to repeat it. And lately, the Berlin Senate seems hellbent on removing relics like the Berlin Wall from view - out of sight, out of mind. Out of memory, too.    

They are currently allowing the development of a strip of land between the East Side Gallery and the river Spree, turning what used to be a symbolic wasteland into condos. Much of that symbolic wasteland was once occupied by people putting on free parties and underground clubs, taking advantage of the empty abandoned space in the years after the Wall "fell". Berghain and its predecessor Ostgut, Kater Blau and Yaam are the last vestiges of that energetically liminal scene. 

As you probably already know  (you're reading this blog, after all) the early techno, trance and acid house scene played a big part in reviving Berlin. Early underground venues and myriad squats kept a buzz about the city at a time when it was at serious risk of becoming an empty shell. The endless parties and free flats drew in anyone that wanted to hit the escape button on whatever suffocating and bureaucratic norms they'd left behind elsewhere in Germany, Europe and places as far as Australia or Israel. Permanently. And this city became a permanent new venue for their dreams...

Yet here we are, a city reinvented and sustained by an eclectic underground, being led by a Senate that's frequently been accused of corruption and collusion with big business. The ExBerliner points out one likely source of crash-for-cash developments, such as the condos at the East Side Gallery:

"From 2002 to 2009, Berlin’s finance minister was Thilo Sarrazin, famous for his anti-immigrant bestseller Deutschland schafft sich ab (“German y is doing away with itself”). His strategy for balancing Berlin’s books: auction these plots to the highest bidder with no strings attached"

Clearly, Sarrazin subscribed to an authoritarian, free market ideology that saw investors as the people that make cities sexy, rather than the creative and often poor people residing in them. Berlin authorities seem to have backed him by allowing his beliefs to be put into action, even years after the fact. 

But the East Side Gallery wasteland - and the squats and clubs that sprung from it - are a constant reminder that these authorities view this city's future with one eye shut. Celebrations and the memories that they commemorate are a huge part of Berlin, as they have been at every human settlement from the Neolithic times onward.

Yet the East Side Gallery and abandoned areas around it are being slowly dismantled to enable these faceless new condos. Apparently, the legendary Berlin tourist attraction is 'getting in the way' of their attempts to recreate Berlin as an Americanised urban profit machine, tuned to extract as much cash from captive markets as it can.

For millions, the East Side Gallery is more than an impediment to building condos and malls: it's a monument to freedom. And the city planners nearly sold the whole lot. Not a good metaphor, is it?

During the Cold War era, you couldn't touch the eastern side of the Berlin Wall without getting arrested... which is why so many artists got a kick out of painting murals on it, once the border had opened. Those paintings are continually retouched and updated to this day, and millions of sightseers come to photograph that stretch of the Wall. Dismantling it for cash is offensive to the majority of locals, for reasons that are cultural, political, historical... and musical, too, since these new developments also put the nearby clubs at risks. 

Unfortunately, it's not over yet: pieces of the East Side Gallery will continue to be dismantled and 'relocated' until the building work is complete. After that, who knows what'll happen to them? Maybe they'll be sold off, or ground down and used to make cement?

As we reached the demo / party, things were heating up. Music was played, speeches were made, and gluehwein was served. Stalwart DJ Dr. Motte riled the crowd up with a speech, raging into about the fact that one of the new hotels being built alongside the East Side Gallery is owned by an ex-Stasi officer.  'They were watching the Wall before and they're still watching it now!' he shouted. Touché!

We danced and watched the spectacle just over the road at the Wall, where tourists were waiting for the big moment when, 25 years ago, the checkpoint at Bornholmer Strasse was opened by nervous guards, acting under public pressure and unclear instructions from their superiors. The balloons were late being released, though: a bunch of them got stuck inside the docking posts that were supposed to release them.  Before even half of them had managed to drift up into the sky, thousands of non-plussed Germans were already trudging back toward  Ostbahnof, muttering darkly amongst themselves and trying to forget the whole disorganised debacle. Perhaps they had more in common with the people building that condo than they realised. 

The desire to revise the past and make it just a wee bit nicer, tidier and more pünktlich is an urge that everyone feels, not just the Germans. But that has to be balanced with a desire to learn from the messes that people have already made and avoid making them again. It also has to be balanced a desire to remake certain messes because they had unexpected benefits, the first time they were made. Sometimes, a bit of Sturm und Drang creates fertile new grounds, galvanises people, brings out the best in them, and creates fresh cause for celebration. That certainly happened with the free party and squat scenes, here.

As the music stopped and my friends and I legged it down the road, back toward Warschauer Strasse station, we passed a bunch of people brandishing balloon docking posts that they'd somehow uprooted from the Wall. Maybe they were helping to clean up; maybe they were just nabbing them as souvenirs. And who could blame them? Left to the mercy of the city's planners, they'd just as quickly disappear from view.

You can find East Side Gallery Retten's future events by checking out their blog.

- Last updated 2019