The record
The longest surviving run at 1.3 km — and the inner wall, built to the outer wall's specification because state visitors drove past it.
The longest section of the Berlin Wall still standing runs 1.3 kilometres along Mühlenstraße, north of the Oberbaumbrücke. Artists from twenty-one countries painted 106 large murals on it in the spring of 1990 — among them Birgit Kinder's Trabant breaking through the concrete and Dmitri Vrubel's painting of Honecker and Brezhnev kissing — and the ensemble opened officially as the East Side Gallery in September 1990. The original plan was to send the pictures around the world as a travelling exhibition and then auction them; it never happened, and the wall and its images have been listed as a monument since November 1991.
What almost no visitor is told is which wall this is. Between the Schillingbrücke and the Osthafen the whole width of the Spree was East Berlin territory, with the sector boundary running along the Kreuzberg bank, so the usual arrangement of outer wall, death strip and inner wall did not apply: there was a hinterland wall and a security fence, and no border wall to the west at all, because the river did that work and patrol boats watched it. The East Side Gallery is the hinterland wall — the side that faced East Berliners.
It does not look like one, and that is deliberate. Because of the bank's topography and because this stretch lay on the protocol route that state visitors took from Schönefeld airport into the city, the inner wall here was built from Grenzmauer 75 elements, the pattern used elsewhere only for the wall facing west. The contrast is visible a few metres away: immediately to the north-west stands an adjoining listed fragment of 1960s hinterland wall, a brick wall from a neighbouring industrial site that predates the border and was reinforced with hollow blocks. Pieced-together brick where nobody important would see it, smooth uniform concrete where they would.
How did it get here?
Original position, painted from 1990. A great many travelling segments in this catalogue are hinterland elements like these rather than pieces of the outer border wall.
Sources & verification
Sites — Stiftung Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall Foundation) ↗
The Foundation's own listing of the sites it runs and documents, with addresses and what survives at each.
Source accessed 2026-09-17
Berlin Wall: where it still stands — Berlin.de ↗
The surviving lengths across the city, and the East Side Gallery as the longest run.
Source accessed 2026-09-17
East Side Gallery — Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Wall monuments ↗
The 1.3-kilometre run north of the Oberbaumbrücke, the 106 murals painted in spring 1990 by artists from twenty-one countries including Birgit Kinder's Trabant and Dmitri Vrubel's Honecker and Brezhnev, the official opening in September 1990, the abandoned plan to tour and auction the pictures, the listing in November 1991, the absence of an outer wall because the Spree and patrol boats served that purpose, the identification of the East Side Gallery as hinterland wall, its construction from Grenzmauer 75 elements because of the topography and the protocol route from Schönefeld, and the adjoining listed 1960s fragment of pre-existing industrial brick wall reinforced with hollow blocks.
Source accessed 2026-09-17
Last verified: Not yet verified
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