A quarter-century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city said Thursday it would build a barrier to protect the longest surviving stretch from a sharp rise in vandalism.
The so-called East Side Gallery — a 1.3-kilometre (nearly one-mile) long slab which artists covered with murals months after the Cold War symbol was breached on November 9, 1989 — still draws up to three million tourists per year.
But souvenir hunters and graffiti sprayers have taken a heavy toll of late, officials told reporters, announcing the erection of a permanent guard barrier.
“We have witnessed in recent weeks and months an unbelievable amount of vandalism,” a spokesman for the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, Sascha Langenbach, told a news conference.
Officials blamed primarily foreign tourists who want to make their mark on a bit of history by scrawling or scratching their names into the Wall’s crumbling concrete, or even chipping away at it.
Many immortalise their acts of destruction with a selfie.
“This barrier should make clear that this is a historical monument,” said Adalbert-Maria Klees of the district’s public spaces commission.
The East Side Gallery last month started restoring the Wall and its nearly 100 murals, which were painted between February and September 1990 by artists from around the world.
But Klees said many of the restored pictures had been immediately defaced again, prompting the decision to build the 80-centimetre-tall (2.6-foot) transparent barrier 1.3 metres from the Wall to keep tourists at a distance.
The 150,000-euro ($163,000) structure is to be completed by early next year, with signs noting the Wall’s status as a protected monument.
Until then, the already-restored murals will be fenced off.