Whichever way the artist drew him, his sad eyes always asked passersby the same question: “Where’s Linda?” Linda’s Ex: a boy bemoaning the loss of his ex-girlfriend.Īt first, people either ignored the posters or were mildly curious. ![]() Sometimes he looked like a boy ready to kill himself sometimes he looked like a man ready to kill. In the summer of 2003, posters of a boy bemoaning the loss of his ex-girlfriend, Linda, began to appear on walls and fences in the Friedrichshain district. Tower’s aim was to reclaim the word as a symbol of strength. Tower’s aim was to reclaim the word as a symbol of strength and, in doing so, proclaim that the majority, not the minority, should be shaping the public space. ![]() But the more they saw it - on lamp posts, on post boxes, on trash cans, on fences - the more they understood what he was trying to communicate: Tower, as in the communist TV tower Tower, as in the skyscrapers that dominated the skyline of almost every major city - built not for the people who lived there, but for the egos of the people who ran them. One East Berliner to make an impact during this period was “Tower.” With his name printed in a variety of colors and fonts on what looked like car stickers, people must have initially mistaken his work for advertising. A street in the East Berlin area of Friedrichshain a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It wasn’t that they were better artists, but that they could express - with authority - the one concept close to the hearts of all people now living in the city: what it meant to be free. Few doubted that the East Germans’ work was weightier. ![]() Mitte, Friedrichshain, Prenzlauer Berg - all of the areas that the military had occupied became a new playground for the Western artists and became a new world for the Eastern artists who joined them. After The WallĪfter the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the graffiti artists marched straight into East Germany. Our East German friends would have been staring not just at the defacement of Communist property, but at what graffiti artists had by then claimed as their Mecca. They either opened businesses or formed squats and, with no resistance from the West German government, began turning walls into monuments to their own thoughts and beliefs.īy the end of the ’70s, a new wave of graffiti artists, arriving with innovations such as stencils and spray cans, were contributing genuine works of art. Abandoned buildings, derelict streets, piles of rubble - the immediate areas around the wall were reminiscent of World War II, and it would take another 10 years for the first communities to settle there.Įven then, those early settlers weren’t “real” Berliners, but outsiders: draft resisters, anarchist punks and Turkish migrants. ![]() If they’d crossed in the ’60s, however, they’d have been tempted to jump straight back. They saw political slogans, either carved indelibly into the concrete or sprayed temporarily onto surfaces, commenting not only on the situation in Germany, but on the whole political world: “ God Ble$$,” “ Concrete Makes You Happy,” “ Death to Tyrants.” As far as they could see, covering every inch of wall, was layer upon layer of zest, life and color. They saw big bubbly letters, spelling out words in German, English and French. The Development Of The Berlin Graffiti SceneĪfter the few East Germans who crossed the Berlin Wall in the ’80s blinked and pinched themselves, what do you think was the first thing they saw?
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