One of the most visually striking things about Berlin is the prolific presence of murals and tags across the city. In the US, graffiti is often viewed as a sign of a neighborhood being neglected, or more popularly "undesirable" often in distinctly racialized terms, so it was fascinating to me to see the nearly blanket prevalence of street art throughout Berlin neighborhoods.
The specific history of graffiti in Berlin is rooted in political art, and closely associated with the era of the city being divided during the Cold War. One of the most famous preserved examples of this in the city today is the East Side Gallery, a section of the Berlin Wall stretching 1316 meters beside the Spree river, in the neighborhood of Friedrichshain. The expanse of the wall is covered in preserved and curated murals that are historic, memorial, and current.
The wall is an incredibly imposing structure up close, a thick grey concrete slab that seems unthinkable to scale, with a rounded edge at the top. The stretch of sidewalk next to it, now covered by tourists, was previously the site of the "death strip", a nearly 160 yard wide and 27 mile long field of barbed wire, watchtowers, guard dog runs, and anti vehicle trenches meant to deter residents of the east from escaping west. Over the course of the wall's existence, from 1961 to 1989, over 100 people died trying to cross it, while another 5,000 made the passage by either climbing and jumping over the wall or tunneling under it.
To the east, the wall was a largely barren expanse, but from the west, the wall was treated as a massive canvas. The site of many murals and messages, the expanse of grey wall became a place for the residents of the west to visualize and make public their opinions, longings, and frustrations about the division that their city lived under.
Following the fall of the wall in 1989, both sides were adopted and covered in paint by the people of the reunified city, as they dealt with the implications of becoming an integral society after nearly thirty years of systemic separation.
Street art in Berlin could be seen as a means of reclamation of a political landscape that was made so physical. After being heavily bombed following WWII, the city was rebuilt and restored in vastly different ways in the west and the east, largely guided by the various political affiliations assigned to different areas. The practice of street art in Berlin could be understood then as a kind of guerrilla ownership by residents and a way for individuals to make their emotional, political, and ideological mark on a city so deeply changed and divided by the politics of the state.
Today graffiti is a significant part of the tourist appeal in Berlin, yet remains an active element of artistic and youth culture within the city. Even every self-respecting bathroom in Berlin has layers of messages and drawings and paint from years of patrons. From somewhere deeply public and official like the East Side Gallery to the outer walls of homes and post boxes in every neighborhood, street art brings a wild array of feeling, perspective, and intention to the historic walls of Berlin.
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