Marina Galperina

All in All, It's Just Another Kiss on the Wall

Brezhnev and Honecker's ferocious make-out painted on the Berlin Wall has just been white-washed. But do not fear - the deadly lovers will be back in all their symbolic glory as Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel recreates the mural in time for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall.

After the Wall came down in November 1989, a three-quarter mile stretch was left. Vrubel's lovely eyesore was one of hundred murals plastered with care into the beaten wall. Bilingually titled Oh Gott, laß mich diese tödliche Liebe überleben / Господи, помоги мне выжить среди этой смертельной любьви! (Oh God, help me survive this deadly love!) featuring Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German politician Eric Honecker is Vrubel's most famous work and has been sustaining steady wreckage of vandalism and weather for nearly two decades.

Vrubel was quite vexed after learning through the press that his time-mauled piece has been cleared off the wall-chunk by the authorities, but has started to recreate the work last Tuesday. He estimates that Brezhnev-Honecker-Smooch 2.0 will take him at least a month to complete and doesn't expect it to be identical to the original. A special undercoat will protect this little piece of history for years to come.

On its grand unveiling in time for the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we presume that the several generations of youngins bred since will have many a history lesson to revisit, specifically, why does the painted image of two hairy, heterosexual, age-riddled communists eating each others' faces means so much.

Image via AFP


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Mona Simmons
June 19, 7:18 AM
Gee, I love this painting. It tells so much about that epoch.

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