How Nikita Khrushchev Turned Berlin into a Happening Art Scene

Berlin's Pride in Graffiti

photo: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/soviet-graffiti-reichstag. PTWO/CC by 2.0

Red Army graffiti from 1945 preserved on the walls inside the Reichstag Building, Berlin

Graffiti is an illegal defacement of property; or maybe it is a creative outlet of expression.

Maybe it's a criminal act of vandalism...or a tantalizing provocation; it's urban blight or subversive political statement. It is, of course, each and all of those. Graffiti is art, voice, expression, vandalism, teenage rebellion, gang territory marking, and outright law-breaking.

Berlin has a unique relationship to it. In the story of Berlin as crucible of 20th century history, graffiti could certainly have its own chapter.

In mid-April 1945 during the last months of WWII, pubescent German boys joined the fresh 16- and 17-year-old conscripts in the German army to repel Soviet soldiers who had advanced into the city of Berlin. Once envisioned as Germania, the capital city of a new world order that was to be established by the Third Reich, Berlin had suffered months of relentless bombing by the RAF and USAAF, leaving the city in ruins. Now a merciless onslaught of Red Army power pounded the city with artillery, and street battles were fought to the death in and around the Reichstag. Just a few months earlier, in a bunker only several hundred meters away, Hitler and his minister of propaganda Josef Goebbels had taken refuge. As the Battle of Berlin raged around them, Hitler poisoned his dog, married Eva Braun, and then took his life with his wife; Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda followed,after poisoning their own six children, from ages 12 to four.

Meanwhile, Russian soldiers had breached the Reichstag and were celebrating, marking the walls with graffiti. This graffiti, most of it Cyrillic scriblings of I was here, remains preserved to this day. If you visit Berlin you can see it on a free tour of this historic building which serves as the present seat of the German Federal Parliament. ( You can book a tour here: https://www.bundestag.de/en/visittheBundestag/dome/tours I recommend it.)

In the aftermath of WWII, the Allies (UK, USA, France, and the Soviet Union) established administrative powers over the defeated Germany, and divided the nation into four sectors, with each of the Allies assuming control of their sector. By 1949, two new countries were born, each under administrative oversight by the victors of WWII: The Federal Republic of Germany, commonly referred to as West Germany, was geographically composed of the French, British, and American administrative sectors, and the Soviet sector comprised the German Democratic Republic, East Germany.

Though Berlin, the capital, was located wholly within the Soviet sector, it, too, was divided into four sectors to be adminstered by the four allies. The French, British, and American sectors were jointly called West Berlin, and even though the city was, at its closest, 110 miles beyond the border, it belonged to West Germany. Surrounded on all sides by East Germany, West Berlin was an isolated enclave that adopted a political/economic system of democratic capitalism, fundamentally incompatible with the communist system of East Berlin which was administered by the Soviet Union.

Berlin was unique, one city operating on two different systems of government and economics, an experiment in oil and water. Some Berliners took advantage of the different systems, choosing to work in West Berlin where they would be paid in the more powerful currency of West Germany, the Deutschmark, yet live in East Berlin, where the cost of living was lower and rent was paid in the East German Ostmark. Crossing the border from East to West and West to East was relatively unimpeded, such that West Berliners would go to working class districts of East Berlin just to get their hair cut, saving some money. Grandparents who lived in East Berlin could take the tram across the city into West Berlin to visit their grandchildren.

Until 1961.

It happened that Germans had been using their feet to choose West German democratic capitalism over East German communism since the dual system was established in 1949. People, mostly young educated people, doctors and engineers, the future of the East German state, simply were walking out of East Germany into West Berlin (and from there, on and out to West Germany and beyond), never to come back. By 1961, East Germany had lost 3 and a half million people, 20% of its population, to the West.

The brain drain got so bad that...

"In the first 11 days of August, [1961,] 16,000 East Germans crossed the border into West Berlin, and on August 12 some 2,400 followed—the largest number of defectors ever to leave East Germany in a single day. https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/berlin-wall#

... and East Germany finally had to do something about it. On August 13, 1961, with the okay of Premier Nikita Khruschev of the Soviet Union, East Germany laid down spirals of barbed wire and a few concrete barriers around the perimeter of West Berlin, and right through the middle of the city at the border between East and West, splitting the city in two, and blocking off all access between West Berlin and East Germany. In total the Wall in ring form was 155 kilometers, 96 miles long.

All to keep their own citizens, East Germans, from fleeing.

Over the years, the barbed wire and concrete blocks became a sophisticated network of the most ferocious technology and manpower ever devised to inhibit free movement of law-abiding citizens. It lasted until November 9, 1989, 38 years. (Here is an informative video that explains how the Wall worked : https://youtu.be/KoJ0Pih0Ssc?feature=shared)

By Noir, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1402275

This photo of the Wall taken in 1986 reveals the complex organism it had become: two walls, about 50 meters (160 feet) apart, separated by a wide gravel-covered swath filled with spikes, anti-vehicle devices, and trip-wire machine guns. Guard towers (not pictured) stood every 250 meters (820 feet). This area between the two walls came to be known as the death strip, for guards were ordered to "shoot to kill" anyone trying to escape. And they did. "140 people were killed or died in other ways directly connected to the GDR border regime between 1961 and 1989, including 100 people who were shot, accidentally killed, or killed themselves when they were caught trying to make it over the Wall." (https://www.berlin.de/mauer/en/history/victims-of-the-wall/)

And here is where we pick up the subject of graffiti again.

You can clearly see it. The question I pose to you is: Is the above photo taken from West Berlin looking into the East, or from East Berlin looking into the West? The presence of graffiti on the Wall always answers that question: You are looking at the Wall from West Berlin, facing the East.

The Wall was solely on East German territory, built about ten feet in from the border, to allow East German guards a patrol path to inspect and maintain it. So painting it actually put one on East German territory, and broke East German law forbidding the defacement of public property.

Almost immediately people in West Berlin started surreptitiously painting slogans on the rough concrete blocks which made up the Wall, sometimes drawing parallels to Nazi Germany, DDR KZ (GDR, Concentration Camp) or es gibt nur EINE Berlin (there is only ONE Berlin). Some slogans were anti-American, some were anti-Turkish (Germany imported many Turkish guest workers in the post-war years). At first, the GDR painted them over, but in time they decided not to care.

When a barrier runs through a vibrant city like a raw scar across the face, when the barrier is a manifestation of two fundamentally different perspectives on the world, when it forcibly separates mothers and fathers from sons and daughters, it is a tragic artifact of oppression. But it creates an enormous blank canvas almost 100 miles long, and becomes a catalyst for creativity.

Continually upgraded, the Wall eventually obtained a smooth white surface, begging artistic expression. In 1984, Thierry Noir, a French artist who had been eking out his living in West Berlin by hawking colorful semi-abstract canvases to diners in restaurants, is credited as the first artist to paint extensive murals on the Wall. He says his "objective was to perform one real revolutionary act: To paint the Berlin wall, to transform it, to make it ridiculous, and to help destroy it prempting its ultimate fall in 1989." https://thierrynoir.com/biography/essays/the-story-of-the-berlin-wall/

Noir's work immediately attracted interest.The project was so provocative, so lively, so daring, that other street artists, some with international renown such as Kiddy Citny, Keith Haring, and Richard Hambleton, came to paint the Wall.

And thus, the Wall became an essential icon and a generator of Berlin's happening art scene. People who heretofore regarded unlawful graffiti as an eyesore at best, a criminal act at worst, came to appreciate the subversive political power of art.

With the populist freedom movements in the1980s, the Eastern Block crumbled. When the border finally opened on November 9, 1989, the Wall's street art had been a tourist attraction in West Berlin for years.

Eleven months passed until the complexities of reunification of the two Germanies could be worked out, and in the interim, demolition of the Wall was the task of the provisional government of the GDR. As reported by The Local, even before official demolition began, ministers of the GDR government showed "a notable capitalist instinct, and passed a resolution to take commercial advantage of the Berlin Wall. An East German foreign trade company, Limex-Bau, received the job of marketing the individual segments...Three-hundred-sixty segments were taken for their artistic value and sold all over the world for prices as high as 40,000 marks." (https://www.thelocal.de/20091019/22677)

You can find segments of the Berlin Wall at a Las Vegas casino, at a park in Indonesia, in the Vatican City, and in 44 countries of the world.

In Berlin, the Wall is no longer a scar through the city. Portions of the death strip have been planted with cherry trees, a gift from Japan, providing long promenades of delicate beauty. Several museums commemorate the history of the Wall. The longest open air gallery in the world is the Eastside Gallery, a portion of the Wall that stretches more than 1 kilometer through the city, painted by more than 118 artists from 21 countries.

https://www.visitberlin.de/en/blog/top-11-places-see-what-remains-wall

Grafitti is nothing new. In fact, the oldest grafitti the world knows was done 40,000 years ago in a cave in Indonesia. 2,500 years ago someone was scribbling written graffiti in Rome that you can see today. Since the 5th century, 1,800 different tourists have signed their names on the walls of a citadel in Sri Lanka, and Lord Byron carved his name on a column of the Temple of Poseidon in Greece. I used to bring friends to a swanky restaurant near my home in St. Paul, Minnesota, to see where F. Scott Fitzgerald signed his name on the bar.

Grafitti is ancient, it is human, it is art, and it evokes visceral reactions. There are coffeetable art books and catalogues picturing the grafitti in Cairo that contributed to the Arab Spring of 2010. Documentaries have been made about graffiti and Black Lives Matter. Spain has feminist graffiti that reads Enough with rosaries in our ovaries.

And there is the Berlin Wall.

© Sarah Knightwriter

More information:

Wikipedia has an extensive list showing an admittedly incomplete list of countires and locations that own a piece of the Berlin Wall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Berlin_Wall_segments

Thierry Noir's website is worth exploring for the photos and interesting stories about his art on the Wall. https://thierrynoir.com/biography/essays/berlin-wall/attracted