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Abstract
During the fifteen-year period before the fall of the Berlin Wall, roughly 250 murals were painted in West Berlin. The initiative for their creation often came from local residents in the neighborhoods where the murals were located. There was a range of skill levels and various involvements by local government, but even when municipal programs were created to underwrite murals, they were a response to what had already been initiated at the community level. Many murals address the quality of urban life by protesting specific urban or industrial changes or projecting alternative cityscapes. The shift in mural art to neighborhood locations and to themes addressing local issues suggests a new role for public art and a new position for murals in relation to public space. In the context of pre-1989 West Berlin, murals became a vehicle for citizens to contribute to the discourse of urban development by challenging mainstream practices, creating solidarity, redefining citizens' place in the urban community, and reimagining the design and experience of the city. Using urban structures to intervene in the processes that were defining urban experience became a way by which the broader community could claim a right to the city.
Notes
1 For an overview of the Berlin Wall, see CitationBrian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), chapter 1.
2 There are numerous books documenting these; see, for example, CitationBenjamin Wolbergs, Urban Illustration Berlin (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2007).
3 This seems to be an honorary recognition stemming from the prominence of the site and Wagin's ongoing actions to keep peace and nature in the forefront of Berliners' consciousness, as in the Parliament of Trees Against War and Violence (originally 1990) in the government quarter. A handful of murals predate his World Tree. For a photograph of this work, see CitationNorbert and Melanie Martins, Hauswände statt Leinwände (Berlin: Norbert Martins, 2012), 69. Aside from this source, which carries Norbert Martins' documentation of murals to the present, and my own exploration of extant murals in situ, I am relying on documents from the period, as cited in these notes, for information about and photographs of original murals. I have located no substantive subsequent research on them.
4 “CitationBei jeder Aktion stehen ein paar Leute Schmiere,” Zitty 15: 1978, in CitationWandmalereien und Texte (Berlin: Karin Kramer Verlag, 1979), 36. All translations are by the author unless otherwise indicated.
5CitationGritta Hesse, Gemalte Illusionen: Wandbilder in Berlin (Dortmund: Harenburg, 1983), 11.
6 Norbert and Melanie Martins, CitationHauswände, 33.
7 See ibid., 33 for this history and photographs. Following reunification, the building was torn down.
8CitationWandmalereien, 125.
9 Ibid., 136.
10 Norbert and Melanie Martins, CitationHauswände, 9.
11CitationNorbert Martins, Giebelphantasien (Berlin: HetStein, 1989), 7.
12 Norbert and Melanie Martins, CitationHauswände, 10; CitationWandmalereien, 37.
13CitationStreet Art: Öffentliche Wandmalereien in den U.S.A. (Berlin: Amerikahaus, 1974).
14 Helga Retzer, “Einleitung,” in Street Art, n.p.
15 Norbert Martins, CitationGiebelphantasien, 9.
16 Norbert and Melanie Martins, CitationHauswände, 29.
17 Norbert Martins, CitationGiebelphantasien, 11. No date is provided.
18 This is the author's translation of Wo ist die Admiralstrasse geblieben?
19 Norbert Martins, CitationGiebelphantasien, 61.
20 Ibid., 10; CitationHesse, Gemalte Illusionen, 11.
21 The German and Turkish texts can be found in Norbert Martins, CitationGiebelphantasien, 75.
22CitationHesse, Gemalte Illusionen, 10–11.
23 This applied to buried remains as well, as in the excavations that exposed the Topography of Terror. See CitationKaren E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
24CitationHesse, Gemalte Illusionen, 9.
25 For the protest movement in Kreuzberg, see CitationRoger Karapin, Protest Politics in Germany: Movements on the Left and Right Since the 1960s (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2007), especially chapter 2, “Urban Renewal Conflicts in Hanover and West Berlin,” 61–116.
26 Significant texts that addressed specifically Germany and Berlin were CitationAlexander Mitscherlich'sDie Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte (The Inhospitableness of Our Cities; 1965) and CitationWolf Jobst Siedler, Die gemordete Stadt (The Murdered City; 1964), cited in Norbert and Melanie Martins, CitationHauswände, 9.
27CitationJosef Paul Kleiheus, VersuchsgebietCharlottenburg (Berlin: Der Senator für Bau-und Wohnungswesen, 1973).
28 For an introductory overview, see CitationHerbert Schwenk, Lexikon der Berliner Stadtentwicklung (Berlin: Haude & Spener, 2002), 309–310.
29 See CitationHardt-Waltherr Hämer and Josef Paul Kleihues, eds. Idee, Prozess, Ergebnis: Die Reparatur und Rekonstruktion der Stadt (Berlin: Frölich und Kaufmann, 1984).
30 The literature for both is extensive and continues to grow. See, for example, CitationAlejandro Anreus, Robin Adèle Greeley, and Leonard Folgarait, eds. Mexican Muralism: A Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
31 “Manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors” (1924), in CitationMexican Muralism: A Critical History, 320.
32 It is worth noting that West Berlin had district town halls, schools, theaters, etc., but no major civic buildings. These were concentrated in the old city center that was located in East Berlin.
33CitationDon Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: The Guilford Press, 2003), 17. See also CitationHenri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. N. Donaldson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) and “CitationThe Right to the City,” in Writings on Cities, trans. E. Kofman and E. Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
34 Mitchell, The Right to the City, 18.
35CitationDavid Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review, 53 (Sep./Oct. 2008): 23. This article has been republished in slightly altered form in CitationRebel Cities (London and New York: Verso, 2012).
36CitationHarvey, “The Right to the City,” 23.
37 Norbert Martins, CitationGiebelphantasien, 61; see 21, 26, 29 for other examples.
38 Ibid., 104.
39 Ibid., 20, 22, 31, 36, 41, 53, 54, 78, 79, 97, 107, 116.
40 Ibid., 100, 105, 106, 111.
41 Ibid., 18, 19, 30, 42, 50, 52, 59, 109, 112, 120.
42CitationWandmalereien, 137; the phrase that is used is die heile Welt.
43CitationHesse, Gemalte Illusionen, 10.
44CitationJohn Weber, “Murals as People's Art,” Liberation 16.4 (Sep. 1971): 44.
45CitationWeber, “Murals as People's Art,” 45.
46CitationTim Drescher, “The U.S. Mural Movement,” in Mark Rogovin, Marie Burton, and Holly Highfill, Mural Manual (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 105.
47 See CitationJohan Kugelberg and Philippe Vermès, eds. Beauty is in the Street (London: Four Corner Books, 2011).
48 For the struggle to recognize the evolution of the modern mural tradition, see Bruce Campbell, “An Unauthorized History of Post-Mexican School Muralism,” in CitationMexican Muralism: A Critical History, 263–279.
49 Another topic needing study is graffiti art, which arose as a widespread phenomenon in West Berlin and elsewhere at the same time as the murals discussed here, in the context of the claim to the right to the city. Whether this standpoint also characterizes the diverse forms of street art, including murals, that developed somewhat later from and in relation to graffiti art also deserves exploration. Although the literature on both is extensive, and the general connection between them and urban environments is recognized, I am not aware of any attempt to theorize this connection. See, for example, CitationJeffrey Deitch, ed. Art in the Streets (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2011), published in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and serving as the catalogue for the first major museum review of the subject.
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Carolyn Loeb
Carolyn Loeb teaches art and architectural history in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. For the past decade, her research has explored the impact on architectural, spatial, and public art initiatives of postwar and post-reunification redevelopment in Berlin. She has published essays on planning, public sculpture, the Berlin Wall, and housing in edited volumes (2012, 2013) and in journals such as Planning Perspectives (2006) and the Journal of Urban History (2009). In 2001, she published Entrepreneurial Vernacular: Developers' Subdivisions in the 1920s (Johns Hopkins University Press).