LEIPZIG, Germany — A young woman and man are submerged in dry, cracked earth . Only their hands and faces are visible; they seem to be trying to pull themselves out.

That 1990 painting by Norbert Wagenbrett, called “Aufbruch” (“Awakening”), is part of a sweeping new exhibition staged for the 30th anniversary of the peaceful uprising that culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall. The show, running through Nov. 3 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, is just a few hundred yards from the church where activists began regularly gathering in 1989 to push for change in the stifling, authoritarian East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic, or G.D.R.

The exhibition, “Point of No Return,” is billed as the biggest so far of East German art, featuring 300 works by more than 100 artists, including dissidents who defied the communist regime and established figures who taught in its institutions.