Berlin: the white line and the wall

On Monday November 3, 1986, a group of five masked men painted a white line on the Berlin Wall. The line started at Mariannenplatz, in the capital's alternative Kreuzberg district, heading west via the Checkpoint Charlie border crossing in the city centre. At points, the line was so thick the paint dripped all the way to the bottom. Where police guarded the wall, it ran thinner, snaking down to the pavement and then back up.

After about 5km, just south of the Brandenburg Gate, opposite the square that now hosts architect Peter Eisenman's Holocaust memorial, the line suddenly stopped. At 11.30 on Tuesday morning, border guards from the eastern side of the wall had ambushed the line-painters and put an end to their project.

The wall collapsed almost exactly three years later. This month, Germany and the world are celebrating the 25th anniversary of its fall.

As the Umbrella Movement Visual Archives and Research Collective no doubt hopes will one day be the case for the artwork that can be found on the streets of Hong Kong today, the murals and graffiti painted and sprayed on the western facade of the Berlin Wall are likely to feature heavily in its commemorations; the contribution of French street artist Thierry Noir has already been feted at a recent retrospective in London.

The white line is unlikely to play a part and yet its story tells more about what that wall did - and still does - to people than any other public artwork ever has.

All five of the wall-painters had been born in East Germany, in Weimar, but had begun to rebel against the communist regime's social norms in their late teens. Frank Willmann read Nietzsche and Solzhenitsyn, his friend Frank Schuster wore sandals and string vests. Wolfram Hasch grew his hair long. Jurgen Onisseit played in a punk band called Creepers. Thomas, his younger brother, was arrested for spraying dadaesque slogans such as Macht aus dem Staat Gurkensalat ("Turn the state into cucumber salad") on to walls around Weimar.