Street art, with training wheels

As I sat there on the balcony listening to my (grown adult) neighbours from the Bruderschaft singing along to Katy Perry, I got to thinking once again about the many differences between Bonn and my previous stomping ground, Berlin.

Of all the things that I miss the most from Berlin - from the cheeky radio stations to the tattooed mothers with biodegradable strollers - I would have to say that the lack of quality graffiti really is the biggest hole in my life right now. Take a look at the examples below:

Out of town sledge

This has been on the power box at the end of my street since I moved to Bonn. That's over a month! That is just not acceptable. You can't have people come to your turf and graffiti their love for a neighbouring city (and their football club, I presume) and then just let it stand.

If no-one tags over this in the next week, I'm going to have to take matters into my own hands and get the spray cans out.


Too much time on his hands

This really is quite a nice piece. It's colourful, it's got presence - you can see the vandal is at least making an effort. But what is the treble clef for? C'mon man - what were you thinking? That could be the uncoolest thing I have EVER seen.

And how did you think that the copyright symbol in the bottom right hand corner was going to help things? I used to scrawl that sort of thing on my pencil case at primary school. I suspect that this graffiti was done by the shop owner's son.

Pool-time blackout

Normally in Germany, the changing room walls at the local pool offer a good insight into a region's graffiti. In Berlin-Kreuzberg, there are tags in Turkish, in Schöneberg's pools you see "personal ads" of all sorts of shapes and sizes(!).

Bonn's changing rooms seem to be covered with cave-man like attempts at graffiti. It would be different if the walls were shiny and bare. But this is like watching a group of kindergarten kids fill out tax returns. This one definitely caught my eye: what a catchy look!

Gentry Fication

This place on the left on Brunnenstraße is just one of many apartment blocks that has been cleared in Berlin recently, to get rid of squatters and make way for something new. On the front of the building is the graffitied message "we are all staying". Although the squatters were kicked out over a year ago - nothing has since happened to the site.

Squatting was back in the Berlin news again this last week with the highly publicised forced eviction of the inhabitants of Liebigstraße in Berlin-Friedrichshain. The tenants - who had previously been squatters - had been told by the landlords to leave ages ago, but they had been fighting in the courts up until the last minute to be able to remain in the building. In the end big business, and the riot police, won out of course. But 2500 police were needed for the operation, 40 of them were injured.

Wandering about on Saturday night in Kreuzberg, I saw the remains of the protesters. They had been fenced in by police because they had been taking part in a non-registered demonstration. That sounds surprisingly like something else in the news recently. Police were seemingly afraid that the demo would turn into something similar to what happened on Friday night, as protesters damaged windows and cars in central Berlin as they passed through.

For me the whole media hullaballoo and the accompanying protests are not just about evicting squatters, but are part of a larger issue. The squatters were just one of the many subcultures that were previously permitted to happily exist in Berlin up until about twenty years ago. But since then the city has started to undergo rapid gentrification. And THAT'S what people are up in arms about.

Putting up with squatters goes hand in hand with tolerating drunk punks and completely untalented musicians on the U-Bahn, so the argument goes. It's what gives Berlin its charm. It's what makes the city cool. To outsiders the argument might seem unrealistic. But, it does have some credence I think. After all no-one wants wealthy people like these two on the right moving in to their area, do they?

The Bademeister

The great thing about Berlin are the unusual, historical sights that you see when you least expect it. Like when I headed for a swim today at Ernst-Thälmann Park in the east of the city.

This mega-sculpture on Greifswalder Straße depicts one of the former bosses of the German Communist Party, Ernst Thälmann. It is about 15 metres high and made of copper. You don't get sculptures like that anymore. Up close it's a pretty tough-looking piece of work to be honest - especially when half covered in graffiti. But it fits the area quite well, because ETP isn't exactly the most charming of Berlin's public parks. And Thälmann's story isn't such a happy one either: after leading his party from 1925 until 1933, he was arrested by the Gestapo and - after 11 years in isolation - was shot dead on orders from Adolf Hitler in 1944.

Rumour has it that after the "fall of the wall" the sculpture was due to be ripped down. But, as so often happens in Berlin, somehow it hung on and it is now in a bit of a state of limbo - half-loved, half-despised. I, for one, hope that it stays.

After you sir!

Some enterprising young man has gone around my local area writing messages to the locals. The one above means "Yuppies out".

This sort of thing has quite a history in Berlin. I don't think there is any other place in the world where the locals dislike the people who've moved in to the city SO much and make a point of telling them about it SO regularly. From what I can tell it's nothing racial or personal. They just really don't want their local area to be infiltrated by people from outside. They are concerned that it changes the fabric of their "kiez", that it turns it into a ...


It's all a bit of a shame really. I always thought that all the different people in this city was the best thing about the place. Tolerance and acceptance of others - not really liking anyone, sure - but letting everyone do their thing. I'm from a long way away... and I'm not going anywhere. Not for the moment at least.

Street art

Even my dad's into Berlin's street art. And he's "no supporter of vandalism". In fact, "he won't stand for it". But the thing is, street art in Berlin is just so crazy, that everyone just gets into it eventually.

At the moment, there's a new street art bandit in town who seems to have a real thing about drawing birds. For weeks now I've been spotting pictures of flying fauna of all shapes and sizes on walls in the east. Credit to the guy (or girl), he or she doesn't seem to have one particular bird. Each bird gets a look-in - keeping things very politically correct.

But I am struggling to find the meaning of this recurring badge to be honest. The classic, the yellow fist, always had a sense of rebellion about it. This street artist just seems to really like birds though. I feel like Jake in Eureka Street - wondering about the meaning of a street message, which maybe isn't meant to be understood.

But for me, you still can't go past this massive mural from Blu on the south side of the river, right where the old border between east and west used to run. It's political, historical AND a logistical masterpiece. It's a once off though - that's probably for the best because if he started doing this on every apartment building wall in Berlin he'd probably get into a spot of bother.

Hanging tough

The East Side Gallery down near Ostbahnhof has been back in full swing now for a while. It's renovation was part of the city's "20 years since the Berlin Wall" celebrations. I drove past there yesterday and couldn't help but notice - while photographing it at 50km/h - that the murals on the wall are almost devoid of graffiti.

Six months into it's new life, and no vandalism? That's almost unberlinian. Is this a new demonstration of respect from the Berlin street art community? Has the city run out of spray cans and marker pens? Normally something like this would be destroyed within weeks. Tags, stencils, stickers - you name it, they'll beat it.

Anyway, I'm impressed people - resist the urge.