By Ruben McCarthy
Visiting the East Side Gallery was an eye opening experience, from seeing all types of murals and how they each told different stories. There were many blank walls which left me wondering why that was the case, but after some reading online I saw that this was due to a restoration project back in 2009. Some artists refused to repaint their artwork as they felt it would destroy the authenticity.
Before lunch we came across a Photoautomat, which prints black and white photo strips. So for best value we preceded to queue in an orderly fashion and then did a mad dash in small groups of three – so we’d all get into the 4 pictures for €3. This definitely left us with some interesting pictures …
In the evening we watched ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex‘ in a small cinema in Neukölln. The events that surrounded this true story were things that I’d not known very well – so I was quite fascinated to learn more about this period of German history and what led up to it. It gave me a deeper perspective of how we view and write about perpetrators of terrorism. In the movie, they were painted in a sympathetic lens and this surprised me when I saw how much violence they committed. It definitely makes me want to learn more about this area of history.
