Berlin Street Art

There is a massive contingency of spraypaint graffiti here in Berlin.

Not just the crappy tags you see on a rickety shitty rail train in Sydney - but decent, abstract art. Reminds me of the art that the Gorillaz music uses.

Goes back to the liberation of the place, when the wall came down & all that.

Especially found in the area where i live (Prenzlauer Berg), and more widely in all of East Berlin.

Here's an extract from a webpage that articulates it a little better.

The roots of graffiti culture can be traced back to West Berlin in the early 1980s, when the

American-occupied sector was the reluctant melting pot of anarchist punks, Turkish immigrants and West

German draft resisters. Kreuzberg, a neighborhood surrounded on three sides by the Berlin Wall, blossomed

particularly well, with miles of wall space and little police scrutiny.

The first so-called writers were heavily influenced by the New York City scene. Works about the time, like the

1983 film “Style Wars” by Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant, and the 1984 book “Subway Art” by Mr. Chalfant

and Martha Cooper, enjoyed a cult following.

But while the west face of the Berlin Wall was blanketed with graffiti, the east face was orderly and gray. The

notorious Stasi police kept graffiti under wraps, and writers in East Berlin risked imprisonment or worse if

they were caught red-handed with spray cans — assuming they could even get their hands on paint.

All that changed, of course, with the fall of the wall in 1989, which opened up vast new blank walls virtually

overnight. Artists, musicians and young people flooded East Berlin, heralding a shift in the youth culture

from west to east. The pockmarked walls of Mitte, Friedrichshain and other gray neighborhoods were soon

carpeted in colorful squiggles.

Graffiti may be vandalism, but it is also celebrated as street art and even regarded as an integral component

of Berliner Strassenkultur.

I'll aim to take photos of some stuff when i'm out and about.

you can keep tabs on it here