"Hands" by Margaret Hunter and Peter Russell

Among the world-renowned paintings of the East Side Gallery, one mural sticks out in particular because it is the only one with its original surface: "Hands" by Margaret Hunter and Peter Russell.By Victoria Bischoff and Nick Snipes

In June 1990, East Side Gallery (ESG) organizer Christine MacLean called Scottish artist Margaret Hunter and asked her if she wanted to participate in the art project. For Hunter, who had lived alternately in West Berlin and Scotland since 1985, it was a privilege to be involved in the project. It offered her an opportunity to express her thoughts on German reunification. She told Peter Russell, a fellow Scottish artist, about the ESG and put him in contact with MacLean. Hunter organized a large allocation for both of them, and in July 1990, the two began working side by side on the ESG. Meanwhile, the GDR and the Federal Republic were negotiating the coming reunification. In June, the official dismantling of the Wall began. On the 1 July, the monetary union came into effect, and border controls ended. Hunter described her impression as follows: “I felt very humbled and reminded of the historical weight of the place and the fact that we were working in what was still the GDR, totally inconceivable months before.”

Despite these complex thoughts and the ever-changing situation, Hunter continued her work. First, she painted "Joint Venture". Meanwhile, she realized that she had an extra allocation of Wall segments and gave a section to the East German artist Birgit Kinder, who was driving past and asked if she could paint on an unfinished section. When Hunter and Russell had finished their paintings, there was still a remaining blank piece between Kinder's "Test the Best" (the well-known Trabi painting, now known as "Test the Rest") and Peter Russell's "Himmel und Sucher". It was on this remaining piece that "Hands" was created. The work was a collaborative effort that was rather spontaneous and proceeded quickly; Hunter painted the hands first, and Russell painted the background afterward.

The idea for "Hands" originally came to Margaret Hunter on the day the Berlin Wall fell. On 9 November 1989, she was visiting Scotland with her German husband, who had lived in divided Berlin for 20 years up to that point. He hurried into her studio to tell her the unbelievable news. She was working on a new painting but spontaneously began overpainting it and worked into the night on a new idea that reflected her overwhelming feelings about that momentous day. She selected a simple motif: arms and hands stretching upward. These were meant as a symbol of hope and remembered the Monday Demonstrations, which were protests in the fall of 1989 in numerous cities against the GDR government. This painting was entitled "Berlin 9.11.89", and Hunter later repeated the idea from this painting for "Hands".

In 2009, twenty years after the protests and the fall of the Wall, many artists returned to the ESG to renew their murals. Since their original creation, numerous paintings had structural damage as well as graffiti on them. Therefore, the artists were asked to repaint them. However, the project manager of the renovation, Helmut Schermeyer, decided that "Hands" should not be painted over but instead should be conserved. In an interview, Hunter suspected that the mural was selected because it was smaller than the others and would, therefore, cost less to conserve. However, she is not entirely sure if this is the case. The treatment was carried out within three weeks by professional conservators Andreas Schudrowitz and Franziska Brühns. This made the painting the only one at the ESG with the original surface preserved. After years of discussion between the Berlin Wall Foundation and Hunter about further conservation of the work, a team from Schudrowitz's company conserved the painting once again for the ESG's 30th anniversary in 2020.

When Margaret Hunter painted her murals in the summer of 1990, she was not sure how long her artworks and the ESG would exist or whether the stretch of the Wall on Mühlenstraße would be torn down within a year or two. After 33 years, however, the East Side Gallery is still standing, and it is impossible to imagine the Berlin cityscape without it.

This text is published under the Creative Commons license "CC BY-NC-ND 4.0". You may share the text by mentioning the license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 and the authors. Copyright information for the images can be found in the image captions.