4 segments of the Berlin Wall, segments 125 to 128. The segments have a total width of 4 meters and a height of 3.60 meters. The artwork today has very faded colors due to the passage of time, but it is still distinguishable.

It is composed of several overlapping drawings: the background layer is a very colorful painting made by the French artist Christophe-Emmanuel Bouchet; on top of it, and on each section of the wall, there are figures in profile with large eyes, a characteristic work of the French artist Thierry Noir; painted over Noir’s figures, one can read the phrase in black letters “Freiheit für Jenne”, which in German means “Freedom for Jenne(r)”; and finally, over all the previous layers, in white letters, the phrase “le duo d'enfer a encore frappé”, which translates from French as “the infernal duo strikes again”, a clear reference to the two French artists Noir and Bouchet.

Thierry Noir’s work is characterized by colorful profile faces; the ones here are monochromatic, which places this piece in his early phase when the artist moved to the Kreuzberg district, to the Georg von Rauch Haus squat, in the early 1980s.

At that time, the Berlin Wall was already painted with numerous graffiti, but Christophe-Emmanuel Bouchet and Thierry Noir were the first artists to paint the Berlin Wall with large-scale figures. The two artists felt an irresistible urge to do something against the Wall, and one night in 1984 they began to paint it. From that moment on, the Wall remained marked by their work, which eventually achieved worldwide fame.

On November 9th, 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of an era. This historical event led numerous European countries to move from the communist sphere to the camp of pluralist democracy. Several of these states later signed the European Convention on Human Rights and joined the Council of Europe.

In 1990, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) donated these four Berlin Wall segments to the Council of Europe. They are currently displayed in the gardens of the European Court of Human Rights.

“You can cover it with hundreds of kilos of paint and it will never be pretty — more than 130 people died because of this Wall. A killing machine cannot be made beautiful.”
— Thierry Noir

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