Dmitri Vrubel and the kiss that changed the Berlin Wall
How a press photograph, a newly opened border and one painter’s uncompromising title became an image recognised around the world.
A family perspective by Artemy Vrubel
6 min read
Dmitri Vrubel repainting “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love” at the East Side Gallery, 2009.
The faces are political, but the painting has always been about more than politics. Dmitri Vrubel took a familiar image of Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker and gave it a new life on a surface that had only recently stopped dividing a city. The result was not an illustration of history. It was a confrontation with history—large, public and impossible to ignore.
A news image becomes a public monument
Vrubel based the mural on a photograph of the socialist fraternal kiss between the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German leader Erich Honecker. On the Wall, he enlarged the intimate political ritual until it filled the viewer’s field of vision.
Then he changed its meaning with a title: “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love.” The words turned a documentary image into something more ambiguous—part political satire, part prayer, part private confession. The Berlin Wall Foundation notes that the title also grew from Vrubel’s personal relationships at the time, tying the public work closely to the artist who made it.
Berlin, 1990: freedom on concrete
Vrubel arrived in the newly united Berlin in 1990. Before that, he had studied at the artistic and graphic faculty of Moscow’s Lenin Institute and operated a gallery from his apartment. He described his way of reworking existing images as “multimedia graffiti.”
That spring, artists from 21 countries painted 106 large-scale works along 1.3 kilometres of the former border wall. The ensemble opened as the East Side Gallery in September 1990. A structure engineered to control movement became an open-air gallery about peace, freedom and the upheaval of a continent.
“The East Side Gallery is the victory of art over history.”
One famous kiss—and a second act of remembrance
The Bruderkuss became the best-known image at the East Side Gallery, but it was not Vrubel’s only work there. His second mural, “Thank You, Andrei Sakharov,” honoured the Soviet physicist, dissident and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who defended human rights and an open society.
Seen together, the two works reveal the range of Vrubel’s attention. One takes an image of state power and makes it emotionally unstable. The other gives a public face to moral courage.
Repainted, not frozen
Weather, pollution and vandalism damaged the East Side Gallery’s early paintings. During the major restoration in 2009, Vrubel returned to repaint his mural. The photograph above catches him in that process: the artist standing inside an image that had already become larger than its original moment.
Restoration did not make the work static. Visitors still meet it differently—with humour, discomfort, affection, historical curiosity or a camera held at arm’s length. That openness is part of its endurance.
1990 → 2026
A family legacy, continued by hand
When my father painted the Fraternal Kiss on the Berlin Wall in 1990, it became one of the most recognisable images of the twentieth century. He died in 2022. Today I carry that story forward in Berlin—by hand, one numbered BRUDERKUSS piece at a time, each with its own digital certificate of authenticity.
THE STORY, AS AN OBJECT
Made in Berlin by the Vrubel family.
A numbered, hand-finished wall piece with NFC-backed authenticity. Only three pieces from the current availability remain.