Berlin Wall Art: Aestheticized Terror
28th IMISE Conference, Venice, Italy.
““We have no regrets for the Wall, but we will miss Wall Art.”
- Walter Momper, Lord Mayor of Berlin, 1990”
Berlin Wall City
With victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, the four Allies divided Berlin into a sector city. Up to the building of the Berlin Wall, Berliners enjoyed free movement in the city, unhampered in their goings from one district to the other. Although demarcation lines existed with signs stating: “You are now entering the democratic sector of Berlin,” i.e. the Soviet Sector of East Berlin, urban circulation was not limited. No wall existed, yet ideology had already divided Berliners.
The word “wall” was used first by Walter Ulbricht, chairman of the communist party, in June 1961. Arguing for transforming Berlin into a “free city” and asked if that meant putting up a barrier, he replied: “No one intends to build a wall.” That was the first and last time an official of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) used the word “wall” in speaking of Berlin’s border.[i]
Less than two months later, during the night of 13 August 1961, East Germany (GDR) sealed its frontier, enclosing the already ideologically divided city with a wall around West Berlin. The operation, code named “Chinese Wall” by Western intelligence, was led by Erich Honecker, who replaced Ulbricht as leader of the GDR in 1971. Under cover of night, soldiers of the People’s Army, Police and armed industrial militia formed a human wall blocking all movement from East to West Berlin, while construction workers coiled barbed wire through the city. What had started at midnight was nearly completed by morning as Berliners awoke to the shock of a sealed city.
As Honecker was congratulating his troops on a successful operation, a West German journalist vacationing in the East asked in alarm where the leaders of the “free world” where…Kennedy, Macmillan, Adenauer…”My God, they walk in freedom and we have to stay behind…in a prison.”[ii]
The impression that the Wall had created a “prison” lingered on, although Adenauer visited two weeks later and Vice President Johnson arrived on 19 August to offer West Berliners moral support. The greatest boost to West Berlin morale was President Kennedy’s visit two years later on 26 June 1963, when he identified himself as a free man and therefore a Berliner. Over a million West Berliners cheered Kennedy’s speech and the press announced that the “first leader of the Western World” had not abandoned West Berlin[iii]
Yet the wall remained and gradually underwent technological development becoming a sophisticated “modern boundary” in East German parlance. Starting as a human wall with barbed wire fencing in August only three months later a “tank secure” cement wall was in place. In the same month Chairman Ulbricht gave the order to plaster and whitewash the gray cement blocks so that the wall appears “civilized.”[iv]
For East German communist leaders, the Berlin frontier barrier was necessary to stop the flight of their citizens to West Germany. From 1957 to 1960, over half a million East Germans had left their state through West Berlin. From the time of its creation in 1949 to the building of the Wall, East Germany had lost ca. 3.5 million of its people to the West, another example of people voting with their feet. In July 1961 alone 30,000 East Germans arrived in the West. Over seventy-five percent of those who fled had passed through the “escape hatch” West Berlin.[v]
To save the communist state, the leadership implemented the “anti-fascist rampart,” as the “barrier/wall” was officially named. For the East German elite, the Berlin frontier barrier embodied the demarcation line of their ideology. In applying Marxism-Leninism with the notion that fascism was a degenerate form of late bourgeois capitalism, East German communists nurtured an enemy image of “fascists” in the West. Consequently, the East German construction of the “rampart/wall” was to protect and assist the proletariat in building the East German state. The “anti-fascist rampart” made it possible for “real, existing socialism” to triumph in East Germany.
In the West no one believed that the Wall was built to keep “fascism” out; rather, its construction was understood as a fulfillment of authoritarian rule. Throughout the sixties and on, historical studies of totalitarianism linked communist forms of government to those of Nazism. In the Western perception, Ulbricht’s “rampart/wall” gave testimony that East Germany was a mere continuation of Hitler’s state. The Wall, supposedly built to protect those within, was perceived as actually imprisoning an entire population of sixteen million Germans. Thus the Berlin Wall entered Western consciousness as the “wall of shame.”[vi]
Wall Isolation
From its inception, the Berlin Wall joined the ideological struggles of the Cold War with “anti-fascist rampart” against “wall of shame.” Both in the East and the West, the Berlin Wall was taken as an important symbol in the combat of communism versus capitalism, reaching an apex with the “Berlin Wall Crisis” and soon another with the “Cuban Missile Crisis’ (1962).
Aside from the Cold War propaganda struggle, the Berlin Wall took on other meanings. For many it was the very symbol of the Cold War itself that had divided the globe and alienated one part of the world from the other. For the Russian writer Victor Nekrassov the Wall expressed a “fright dream, a nightmare, a trauma, Kafka” and stood symbol for the (in) human condition of the 20th century.[vii]
For some it was worse: it was death. From August to the end of 1961, twenty-one people lost their lives at the Berlin Wall. During its twenty-eight year existence, the Berlin Wall claimed at least seventy-eight lives, the last in February 1989, nine months before the Wall’s demise.
For others the Wall brought separation of families and loved ones or friends; it brought hardships to those who remained in Berlin East or West and punishment to those who sought to leave the East; it brought complete severance of a city’s population and constant frustration to those who attempted to form any human reunion. Not only were emotional ties of a people cut, but physical connections were severed as well: telephone lines cut, streets and transportation broken, and all essential life lines—food and exchange, electricity, gas, television, radio—dismembered. The official Western rhetoric gave West Berlin the status of an “island of freedom in a sea of oppression.”
For 10, 795 days and nights the Berlin Wall was the cause of human unhappiness, illness, grief, and death.
Still, the drive for reunion was so strong that when, after twenty-eight months of total separation, the East German authorities opened the Wall for a brief period from Christmas 1963 to January 1964, over 730,000 West Berliners visited East Berlin, despite the long wait in winter weather to obtain visas and entry permissions from frequently hostile and unfriendly East German border guards.[viii]
The astonishingly numerous visitors sent a clear message that the Berlin Wall had isolated people from people who did not want to be isolated.
The “Modern Border”
(Term used in East German Border Regulation, 21)
Illuminated day and night, the Wall stood bleak and white and “civilized” in the East, where it was an untouchable icon upholding the values of communism. The Wall’s white paint and stark lights undoubtedly aided border guards in detecting transgressors of the barrier. In the West, the Wall immediately became a tableau, a blank page, demanding protest with anti-communist slogans and depreciations, insults and profanities painted on Ulbricht’s “civilized” concrete.
Marking the Wall was considered a “violation of the border” by East Germany. Although the Western Allies until after the Four Power Agreement of 1972 did not recognize East Germany, the border of the Soviet Zone of Occupation was respected.
In response to “border violations” East German guards would open metal doors within the Wall and occasionally chase “wall violators” on the Western side and if captured take them to the East where prison sentence awaited the unfortunate.
In building the Wall, East Germany sought to abide by President Kennedy’s “three essentials” of Western policy toward Berlin (July 1961) and therefore constructed the Wall on its territory, i.e. within the Soviet Zone of Occupation. As a result, anyone on the Western side standing directly in front of Wall was already on the other side of the border.
The border surrounding West Berlin was nearly 166 kilometers in length with 48 kilometers running through the center of the city. The “modern boundary” was more than just a wall. The boundary of Berlin’s city center was about fifty meters in width and entailed a complex, from East to West, of concrete segments and contact fences with alarms, observation towers and protective bunkers, warning devices, trip wires and spotlights, dog patrol tracks and convoy paths, line markings for border guards (indicated their westward limit) and deep trenches for vehicles, lighting systems and raked control tracts (death strips) and finally the concrete segments with pipe coverings that faced the West.[ix]
“Imagination Knows No Limits”
(Inscription on the Berlin Wall)
The Wall’s construction underwent four generations of modernization. The fourth version, introduced in 1976, replacing the horizontal cement blocks held together by wire rods, consisted of pre-fabricated high density concrete segments, each with a width of 1.2 meters and a height of 3.6 meters topped with heavy concrete piping, preventing any hooks or hands from obtaining a grip on the Wall.
With such a technologically and labor-intensive investment by the GDR, penetration of the “modern boundary” became increasingly more difficult and escapes infrequent. Yet the same technology had produced a seamless, smooth concrete surface on the Western side that became the world’s largest empty canvas beckoning anyone and everyone to leave a mark on the “modern boundary.” To the earlier political slogans, messages of protest, profanities or inscriptions, now crude and sophisticated graffiti and paintings were added, changing not only the Wall’s appearance but through the process imposing visual and symbolic forms of communication upon a once mute edifice of naked power, stark force, and overt terror.
A grass-roots aesthetic movement heeded the call and the Berlin Wall became a popular canvas where uninhibited visual and symbolic expressions found an outlet. Others had already set an example. In Switzerland, Harald Naegli, known as the “Zurich Sprayer,” had imprinted that city with linear figures. Inspired by the pop art of Joseph Beuyes and Andy Warhol, Naegli popularized spray can technique painting, became internationally known, was wanted by Interpol and offered a professorship in Wiesbaden. The “Subway Art” of New York City, another example of aerosol spray can art techniques, was also known and became an inspiration especially to the underground movement in Kreuzberg, a district of West Berlin where counterculture flourished. New York’s urban idioms contributed as well giving young Berliners along the Wall a new perception of living in “Wall City” and having “Wall Power,” all reflected in the graffiti on the Wall running through Kreuzberg. Thus it was not coincident that one of New York City’s famous artists, Keith Haring painted the Wall in response to an international call to participate in a competition entitled “Overcoming the Wall through Art” in 1984. Haring’s use of a few bright, colors—orange, red, black—and a chain of linked figures was a typical example of New York Subway and Berlin Wall Art.[x]
Using a similar style of a row of figures, Richard Hambleton, on a world tour with his famous series of silhouettes entitled “Secret Mission,” painted the same in Berlin in 1983, where the Wall’s horizontal space gave his “men in black” enough room for others to add to the paintings faces, objects or inscriptions. One reads “I like Beuys/Boys” with the painter’s name crossed out.
Hambleton’s series of silhouettes found many imitations with the application of stencil graffiti or “Pochoir,” which permitted the repetition of identical motifs that were quickly sprayed on the Wall over a considerable distance, appearing everywhere. Although aerosol spray was popular due to its fast application, other paint tools were used as well such as brushes, rollers, color chalks, felt tip pens, even relief and mosaics for installations.
Two of the most known painters of the Berlin Wall are Thierry Noir and Christophe Bouchet, who started covering the Wall in 1984. They developed their own method, as Noir explains: “We paint as quickly as possible. The quicker it goes, the better it turns out. I have one pot each of blue, yellow and red. That’s it. I paint with rollers, zip, zip, zip, quick, just shapes. Then I spray on the contours.” [xi] As a “border violator” he had to paint fast. To avoid the long arm of East German border guards, Noir also painted at night with large lamps powered by a car battery illuminating the Wall. One such night, four border guards jumped over the Wall to capture him and he just managed to escape. But he was photographed by the border guards and known to the East German police with the consequence that he could neither set foot in East Berlin nor travel via land route through East Germany to the West.
Christope Bouchet faced like difficulties with the East German authorities and his style too evolved out of the object he was painting. “I paint differently,” Bouchet stated. “I use what I can from the old graffiti and dress it up to reveal figures, vast landscapes, and big monsters baring their teeth.”[xii]
One of their murals entitled “Hommage a La Fontaine” (1985) near Checkpoint Charlie was populated with fantasy figures and rabbits frolicking playfully in an exotic landscape. The bright colors of orange, red, green, blue, black, white, yellow dispelled the grim and dreary reality of an urban wasteland near the Wall and transformed it into a vibrant fantasy land. And since hundreds of rabbits now inhabited this idle ground, once a thriving city district, the mural gave the scene a humorous flair.
Fantasy images in vibrant colors were popular. Exotic heads with spiked, shrill red hair and lush scarlet lips were a trade mark of Kiddy Citny’s portraits, which transmuted the monochromatic Wall into an explosion of colors and gave life to an otherwise dead space.
Nora Aurienne took another approach. Painting vases, pitchers, plates, jars which appear to crash against the Wall, she marked her protest by “throwing” her “object images” against the hateful edifice.[xiii]
By dressing up old graffiti to create new figures, Bouchet turned the common phenomenon of painting over earlier works into an advantage and methodology for his works. Wall Art was frequently the art of the moment, here today, gone tomorrow. In fact, most of the Wall Art exists today in photographs or human memory. The celebrated Keith Haring mural was soon painted over by Bouchet and Noir with forty-two statues of liberty in celebration of the famous statues centennial. Ron English in turn painted over their work with surrealistic figures in 1988. Today only photographs remain.
Yet, Wall Art was not conceived for museums or for future generations. It addressed the harsh and cruel contemporaneous situation in Berlin, offering people visual suggestions of another space and time, one where the Wall was rendered harmless, or breached, or robbed of its frightening reality.
The Wall also became a site for art installations. Christophe Bouchet, following Duchamp, made a statement by attaching a urinal to the Wall. In 1984 Noir and Bouchet installed a washbasin, a pair of shoes and a cellar door (a potential exit?) into the Wall. With his “Wall Street Gallery,” Peter Unsicker situated himself a few meters in front of the Wall, where he mounted a macabre installation consisting of a draped sheet with a dozen death masks penetrating the starched linen. A mosaic of broken mirrors distorting the reflections of viewers followed this grotesque.[xiv] Apparently Unsicker was more concerned with reminders of the Wall’s horror and distortion than in offering alternative visions or possibilities.
Not everyone sought to dispel the grim reality of the Wall. In 1986 a group of former East German peace activists now living in West Berlin protested against Wall Art by drawing a bold white band through all the paintings from Kreuzberg’s Mariannen Square to the Potsdamer Square. They reasoned, “That the Wall must be seen for what it is. It is not a tourist attraction.” It is true the Berlin Wall had become West Berlin’s number one unofficial tourist attraction, drawing about five million visitors each year. What the anti-art group could not tolerate was that primarily due to Wall Art the Wall had become “the Eight Wonder of the World.”[xv] Fortunately, the iconoclasts’ white band was soon painted over as well with more graffiti and paintings.
Not only painters or scribblers sought to give the Wall another reality. Between 1978 and 1980 the architects Jasper Halfmann and Clod Zillich proposed a “duplication of the Wall.” Recognizing that the Berlin Wall had become “the most powerful architectural monument of Berlin’s post-war history,” the architects envisioned building “…a double of the Wall; to add to the existing functional one another totally non-functional one.” This “Wall-Double,’” however, would have a cultural function with a Wall museum, “frontier-cabaret,” souvenir shops, and “psycho-touristic attractions” for “Wall Festivals” that would feature the new Berlin bands like “Geile Tiere Berlin (Horny Animals Berlin), ‘Beton Combo’ (Concrete Combo), or ‘Einstuerzende Neubauten’ (Collapsing New Buildings}.” This architectural project was nothing less than the counterculture’s claim to the Berlin Wall.[xvi]
And with right! It was West Berlin’s counterculture that had transformed the monochromatic edifice of terror and death into a colorful theater set, where anyone and everyone could play a part, write his or her own lines, and contribute to the great human drama of making more of reality than is given. And was that not Nietzsche’s vision of art and art making, and the essential meaning of existence in alleviating the terrors of life?[xvii]
Wall Terminus
On 9 November 1989 the Berlin Wall was opened and East Berliners streamed to the West en masse. The Wall shed its function, its terror, its purpose, and within days people were sitting, dancing, drinking on it as if it were a picnic table. Soon the “Wall Peckers” arrived and chipped away, leaving only a skeleton of fragmented cement and steel grills.
Most of the Wall Art disappeared into a thousand morsels of souvenirs.
After a California millionaire had offered fifty million dollars to purchase, dismantle and exploit the Wall, East German officials and Western capitalists smelled lucre.[xviii] The moment had arrived to transform mere “art” into real “ART” (that is capital) and East German border guards were given a new function to dismantle sections of the Wall that still held Wall Art. An enterprising group of Limex-Bau Export-Import (East Berlin) and LeLe Berlin Wall (West Berlin) formed quickly to sell eighty-one segments with Wall Art in a public auction on 21 June 1990 at the luxurious Galerie Park Palace in Monaco. The sellers, Limex-Bau and Ms. Judith LaCroix (the head of LeLe), declared that the “proceeds of the auction will go toward assisting public health in the German Democratic Republic.” Two prominent doctors wrote the moving introduction to the catalog.[xix] After the auction the proceeds found other venues. Of the eighty-one Wall segments sold, fetching nearly 1.3 MILLION DM, Thierry Noire and Kiddy Citny had painted forty-seven.
The sellers argued that the artists had no right to claim remuneration, for their work was merely “imposed art” (Aufgedraenkte Kunst) that is, art not requested or wanted by the owner. Meaning: the owner of the Wall, the GDR now Limex-Bau and LaCroix, had not asked the artists to paint on their property, the Wall, and therefore they owed the artists nothing. After five years of litigation in the lower courts, the German Supreme Court decided in favor of the artists on 23 February 1995. The Court argued that the property itself had no value without the art. No better statement could have been made concerning the Berlin Wall.
Six months after the demise of the Wall, East Berliners, who for twenty-eight years had faced a blank, whitewashed and “civilized” Wall, now expressed a desire for Wall Art. Between May and October 1990 one hundred artists from around the world participated in painting over one kilometer of naked surface and the “East Side Gallery” was born. Thierry Noir participated and painted about thirty meters of the same comical series that had made him famous in the West. In 1992, the municipality of Berlin moved the East Side Gallery to a neighboring site and made it a permanent exhibit of the city.[xx]
Walking along the East Side Gallery and looking at the paintings with cars rushing by, I felt more than ever a sightseer taking in another urban attraction. Although many of the paintings were artistic, clever or funny, to me they were paintings on a city wall, not Wall Art. The dynamic was lacking and so was the protest, and the reason for that protest, the Wall, was gone.
When asked why he painted the Wall, Bouchet replied, “To have a little bit of a revolt.” He and Noir had lived only five meters from the Wall in 1984. Their revolt was a physical reaction against the pressure of “Wall Power” what many felt who lived close to the Wall. They realized they could not “beautify” the Wall. Noir stated: “We are not trying to make the Wall beautiful, because that, in fact, is absolutely impossible. Eighty persons have been killed trying to jump over the Berlin Wall, to escape to West Berlin, so you can never cover that Wall with hundreds of kilos of color, it will stay the same. One bloody monster, one old crocodile, that from time to time wakes, eats somebody up, and falls again back to sleep until the next time.”[xxi] With that realistic view of the Wall, Noir merely attempted to bring “pleasure” to those who lived next to the “crocodile” and to express as well a “political act” of protest.
The Wall is elsewhere now, in the minds of the people, who after more than twenty-eight years of separation and isolation have a difficult time in uniting as Berliners. I realized that the Wall left more than photographs and memories. It has left historical lesions that have not yet healed.
END NOTES
[i] Joachim Nawrocki and Manfred Rexin, East Berlin (Informationszentrum Berlin: Berlin) 19.
[ii] Dietmar Schultke, Keiner Kommt Durch (Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag: Berlin, 1999) 58 (my translation).
[iii] Irene Lusk and Christiane Zieseke, Stadt Front Berlin West Berlin (Elefanten Press: Berlin, 1982) 124.
[iv] Schultke, Keiner Kommt Durch, 60.
[v] Udo Wetzlaugk, 750 Years Berlin 1987 (Informationszentrum Berlin: Berlin, 1987) 39.
[vi] Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin (The University of Chicago: Chicago and London, 1998) 16-28.
[vii] Schultke, Keiner Kommt Durch, 61.
[viii] Wetzlaugk, 750 Years Berlin 1987, 42.
[ix] Nawrocki and Rexin, East Berlin, 21-25.
[x] Werner Sikorski and Rainer Laabs, Checkpoint Charlie and the Wall (Ullstein: Berlin, 1987) 103-105.
[xi] Heinz J. Kuzdas, Berliner Mauer Kunst (Elefanten Press: Berlin, 1990) 22.
[xii] Kuzdas, 22.
[xiii] Kuzdas, 32.
[xiv] Kuzdas, 40-41.
[xv] Kuzdas, 55.
[xvi] Jasper Halfmann and Clod Zillich, “On the Wall, 1978-1980,” in Doug Clelland, editor, Post-War Berlin 25 (Architectural Design: London, 1982) 82-83.
[xvii] See Friedrich Nietzsche’s argument on aesthetics in his The Birth of Tragedy (Vintage Books: New York, 1967).
[xviii] Kuzdas, Berliner Mauer Kunst, in the cover end refers to the California millionaire.
[xix] See the auction catalog, « Vente Aux Encheres A Monte-Carlo, « Samedi 23 Juin 1990.
[xx] Berliner Zeitung, 3 December 1992.
[xxi] Thierry Noir, “The Story of the Berlin Wall,” photocopied handout given to the author by Noir in 1997.
