On our last evening in Berlin, around midnight, we stood and observed 'My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love', sometimes known as the 'Fraternal Kiss', a mural painting which depicts an embrace between Leonid Brezhnev, a prominent Soviet Communist politician during the Cold war, and Erich Honecker, the leader of the DDR, or Soviet East Germany. The kiss is not romantic, but rather a common fraternal greeting in Russia. It was painted by the Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel in 1990, on the East side of the Berlin Wall which separated the Soviet East and the West. This bold piece has often been received as satirical.
A group of Slavic sounding tourists were also admiring the big platonic smooch, and kindly offered to take our picture. I asked the elderly-ish ringleader "Where are you guys from?" with much enthusiasm.
He looked down and shuffled his feet in shame. "Fucking Russia…"
I stuttered a bit tentatively and mustered all the polite British diplomacy I could. We actually ended up having a really nice chat, about travel, language, the current state of the world...We parted on a note of friendship, as the man, who's name we never caught, invited us to his home in Moscow. "Please, please, come to Russia!"
Truly, East meets West in Berlin.
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