Satire, Erasure and Deadly Love: The story behind the Berlin Wall’s Fraternal Kiss
A commentary on Dmitri Vrubel’s mural My God, Help Me to Survive this Deadly Love (1999)
Even if a certain cliché would have us believing otherwise, nothing ever vanishes without a trace. One brilliantly cornucopious affirmation of this is the Berlin Wall: although dismantled during the Wende, enabling Germany to officially reunify on 3rd October 1990, fragments of the once-impenetrable Cold War border evidently remain extant.
For Janet Ward, this complicated persistence equates to ‘spectral longevity’, with the Wall’s remnants and consequences, lines and projections, traces and staging all engendering an ‘inverse, imaginary status’ similar to that of a ‘photographic negative’ (2011:59). Equally, Sunil Manghani has foregrounded the particular visuality of the Wall’s absence, since those visiting Berlin today paradoxically witness its disappearance, situated in a ‘curious hinterland between memory and actuality’ (2008:36).
For fear that the Wall’s physical demise would prompt the erasure of such a vital part of Berlin’s history, the East Side Gallery was established in 1990. Comprising over 100 murals painted on a 1.3km long remnant of the Wall, this open-air exhibition features works created by artists from all over the world.
One such artist is Dmitri Vrubel, whose mural, Mein Gott, hilf mir, diese tödliche Liebe zu überleben, is likely one of the most photographed of these artworks, vibrantly depicting Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker, the then leaders of the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic respectively, in a fraternal embrace. The piece is a reproduction of Régis Bossu’s 1979 photograph entitled Le baiser, which immortalised the socialist kiss that took place during the 30th anniversary celebration of the GDR.
Vrubel’s painting is iconic, often serving as a visual metonym for the entirety of the Wall in its present state. As a work of street art, the mural constitutes an, albeit legal, reclamation of public space — nevertheless drawing on graffiti’s intense magnetism and illicit appeal.
Against this backdrop, Vrubel’s mural is a vehicle of resistance, having repeatedly fought against erasure to impart an understanding of the subtext of Berlin’s history. Due to his satirical undermining of the mural’s photographic source, Vrubel offers an elaboration of visual revolt; starkly condemning the constraint and confinement that the Cold War’s most powerful monument both embodied and effectuated.
Although the painting has faced criticism as an ostensibly ‘straightforward reproduction’ of Bossu’s photograph (Minaev 2003:31), Vrubel’s addition of colour, introduction of textual elements, emphasizing and removal of certain details all rework and reframe the original image. To an almost claustrophobic effect, Vrubel has chosen to paint an extreme close-up of Bossu’s photograph, meaning that viewers are generally at eye-level with the two men’s lips. Whilst this magnification could be overwhelming to the beholder, obliging them to retreat from the mural in order to view it in its entirety, Vrubel declared that he was in fact ‘amazed by how low’ the Wall is, having imagined ‘a fortification too big to see beyond.’ He asserted that the border should instead have been so tall that ‘West Berlin could not be seen from the East at all’ (Borzenko 2014:1).
By de-centring the image and cropping Honecker’s head so it lies partially outside of the frame, Vrubel insinuates the GDR’s subservient relationship to the USSR and suggests an imbalance between the two partners as nations. Instead of reproducing some of the detail visible behind Brezhnev and Honecker in Bossu’s photograph (most notably other politicians who attended the anniversary celebrations looking on and applauding) the mural background is a pale turquoise, serving to draw attention to Vrubel’s re-contextualisation and reappropriation of the kiss. Whereas many sections of the gallery are a continuous flow of colour, Vrubel emphatically separates his image from the two either side (Irina Dubrovskaya’s The Wall must crumble when the meteorite of love comes flying and Marc Engel’s Puppets of a Displaced Piece) with two white panels, thus highlighting his own re-framing of Bossu’s photograph and foregrounding disunity, all whilst ensuring the prominence of his mural within the gallery.
Employing a playful, graffiti-esque font, which incorporates a mixture of upper and lower case characters, the German title of the work is painted in black below Brezhnev and Honecker on the slanting curb which connects the wall to the pavement. The title most prominently appears in Cyrillic script: on the top border of the wall reads Господи! Помоги мне выжить [good lord! Help me to survive] in black text on a red background, then layered over the bottom in much larger red text is среди этой смертной любви [among this deadly love]. Vrubel thus juxtaposes his painting with a semantic field evoking the dualistic trope of Eros and Thanatos. Indeed, the artist has insisted that his mural depicts ‘much more than a socialist ritual’, instead evoking the ‘universal truth’ of the pain that can be caused only by love (Becker 2009:1).
Nevertheless, interpreting the mural with a focus on the socio-historical context of its intertextual reference to Bossu’s photograph would mean that this ‘deadly love’ could be an allusion to the military agreement between East Germany and the Soviet Union, which bound the countries even closer. The signing of this agreement came during a time of extreme economic insecurity for East Germany; Honecker’s promises of national income growth and stable prices for basic commodities were considered ‘wildly optimistic’ and ‘deceptive’ (Vinocur 1979:1). In this regard, it is intriguing to note that Vrubel refrained from reproducing Brezhnev’s glasses, perhaps to tacitly imbue the image with a reference to a lack of (fore)sight and by extension, those deceived by political conceit.
Notably, Manghani postulates that the Wall was a ‘message board’ primarily for the West, since the dominant language of its graffiti was English, ‘arguably denoting Western directedness, or, in other words, that the Wall writings were not ‘so much an expression by Germans against a Wall built by Germans as an answer by the people of the West to the concrete ‘stone-walling of the East’ (2008:128) Furthermore, Manghani emphasizes that the graffiti ‘was never actually able to connect with those in the East, as disputably the graffiti actually assisted the border Wall’s function as a ‘screen which hid the GDR’, since ‘like a mirror the graffiti reflected back the western world, rendering the Wall invisible’ (2008:128). By intertwining German and Russian text, Vrubel frames his mural in the context of the GDR and as such addresses this overlooking of the former East German perspective. Equally, the foregrounding of strips of white, blue and red along with the tripartite structures both vertically and horizontally evoke the Russian flag. This draws attention to Vrubel’s nationality and by extension his authorship, thus accentuating the subjectivity of his depiction which looks back on a German historical document from his Russian standpoint. Furthermore, against the backdrop of prominent anti-gay sentiments in Russia, Vrubel’s combination of Cyrillic script, Russian colours and two men kissing has led to a reading of his image as a satirical undermining of homophobic attitudes. Between 1990 and 2009, the mural was increasingly covered with smatterings of graffiti, including numerous messages urging for the free practice of LGBTQIA+ love.
In 2009, Vrubel’s painting became so hidden by graffiti and so acutely damaged by erosion that it was completely erased as part of a lottery-funded renovation project. Ostensibly, the eradication of the image was unbeknownst to the artist himself until he was controversially invited to recreate his work in the same year (Paterson 2009:1) Despite ‘mixed feelings’, Vrubel acquiesced, this time using more durable paint (Becker 2009:1). Vrubel’s mural thus raises questions of the inevitable tension between reproduction and authorship; recalling Benjamin’s conceptualization of a work’s ‘aura’: in other words, the postulation that a work of art’s presence in time and space is irreproducible, and as such reproduction alters the original aura of a work, creating a new aura in its place (1963:10). Although Vrubel has debatably reproduced his work in the same space, the inescapable temporal distance engenders immeasurable layers of removal from the original. Furthermore, due to the East Side Gallery’s heritage-protected status, cleaners are employed to remove any graffiti that appears and a temporary fence has been erected to ‘protect’ the murals (Connolly 2015:1). But as Manghani asserts, the graffiti on the Wall ‘was duly a form of art for and of the people, its presence epitomizing dialogue and community’ (2008:128). Graffiti’s potency lies in its ignorance of the ‘borders between producers and recipients’ (Mayer 1996:218) and as such its eradication equates to the deletion of a historical palimpsest.
In terms of this silencing of dialogue, ‘protecting’ the mural in this way could be seen to threaten the gallery’s original aims. As stated by the Kuenstlerinitiative East Side Gallery e.V, an association of the artists behind the project, it was intended as a ‘monument to the fall of the Wall and the peaceful negotiation and opening of borders between societies and people’ (Arandelovic 2018:32). The Wall, a dual sight and site (Manghani 2008:35) of disunity and segregation, had been thus reclaimed and transformed into an expression of artistic freedom, as painters adorned the ominous concrete panels with images dedicated to joy, love, liberty and democracy (Arinushkina 2017:1). The counterargument to this of course, would be that those who painted over Vrubel’s mural were disrespectful of his own right to self-expression. Nevertheless, Vrubel perceives the Wall as a ‘victory of emancipated art’, due to the complete absence of hierarchy between professionals and amateurs (Becker 2009:1). However, he has since admitted additional underlying motivations: he had long dreamed of global notoriety and having his work displayed in a popular exhibition, to the extent that when he was offered a contract to produce a mural on the Wall, he failed to read it and then later realised he had transferred all of his rights to the gallery (Arinushkina 2017:1). The knowledge that Vrubel considers his mural to be ‘die beste Werbung fuer ihn’ [his best advertisement] foregrounds the seemingly sensationalist, or at least, intentionally provocative, aspects of his choice of subject matter (Becker 2009:2). Reading Vrubel’s comment as paratextual information about his image means it can be seen as a satirical act: the commercialist language of self-promotion undermines the gallery’s virtuous endeavours, in turn paralleling the manner in which the socialist fraternal kiss politicizes and challenges the archetypal symbolism of this gesture by marking a deceptive economic pact.
Initially produced eleven years after Bossu’s photograph, Vrubel’s mural re-popularised and recast the image. The ‘deadly love’ of the title both literally and figuratively frames the depicted fraternal kiss, activating the painting in an ironic, satirical form. As a forceful icon of Communism’s corruption and eventual failure, the mural itself has been reproduced and commodified, appearing on coffee cups, bags and t-shirts throughout Europe and beyond. Vrubel’s work has even inspired numerous parodies, where the humour is derived from photoshopped images of world leaders, portraying allegedly close political relationships as romantic. Ironically, the producers of these imitations attempt to criticise figures such as Trump and Putin for their homophobic policies by themselves invoking homophobic stereotypes — in doing so, they misappropriate the satirical edge of Vrubel’s piece. Above all, his mural’s history of erasure and reproduction underscores the Wall’s lasting significance as a historical palimpsest; demonstrating the manner in which the controversial nature of street art, can, if it is not hindered, enable the democratisation of the exchange between artist and audience, continually documenting the ever-changing meaning of particular urban spaces, and allowing the proliferation of a city’s vast spectrum of alternative stories and perspectives.
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