Which two leaders are depicted in the Berlin Wall mural known as “The Fraternal Kiss”?
Answer
Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker
“The Fraternal Kiss” depicts Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German leader Erich Honecker.
The mural, whose full title is “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love,” reproduces a 1979 photograph of Brezhnev and Honecker embracing and kissing at the 30th anniversary celebrations of the German Democratic Republic. Soviet and East German leaders used this ritual greeting to express socialist solidarity.
Russian artist Dmitri Vrubel painted the mural on the East Side Gallery in 1990. The image quickly became one of the best-known works on the former Berlin Wall because it combines political ceremony with satire and visual exaggeration.
The mural has been restored more than once because weather, pollution, and repeated repainting damaged the original surface. It is often mistakenly attributed to the photograph’s subjects, but Vrubel created the painted version.