Street Art & Subculture
The East Side Gallery, Kreuzberg squats, graffiti, the anarchist scene and the do-it-yourself subcultures that define the city’s edge.
Part of Berlin
13 moments in this segment.
- - The Ampelmännchen. The jaunty hatted pedestrian-light figure of the East, an Ostalgie icon that survived reunification.
- - Teufelsberg. The Cold War listening-station on a rubble mountain, now a graffiti-covered ruin and outdoor art space.
- - The Kreuzberg squats. The anarchist, Turkish and punk heart of West Berlin, squatted tenements and the city's radical edge.
- - May Day in Kreuzberg. The annual May 1 ritual of riots-turned-street-festival, politics, sound systems and tear gas.
- - Kunsthaus Tacheles. A bombed Mitte department store turned anarchic artists' squat and gallery, a 1990s post-Wall legend.
- - My God, Help Me to Survive. Dmitri Vrubel's East Side Gallery mural of Brezhnev kissing Honecker, the "fraternal kiss".
- - The radical underground. The squats, the autonomists, and the long anti-gentrification battles of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain.
- - The East Side Gallery. The longest surviving stretch of the Wall, painted by 100+ artists in 1990, the world's longest open-air gallery.
- - YAAM and the riverbanks. The Afro-Caribbean beach-bar culture of the Spree banks, sound systems, sand, and reclaimed industrial space.
- - Mauerpark. The old death strip turned Sunday people's park, karaoke, flea-market, and a city at play on the former border.
- - Haus Schwarzenberg. The last un-renovated courtyard off Hackescher Markt, a riot of paste-ups, stencils and street art in gleaming Mitte.
- - Graffiti capital of Europe. Berlin's endless trains, walls and shutters, one of the densest, most storied graffiti landscapes in the world.
- - BLU's murals. The Italian street artist's monumental Kreuzberg murals, later painted over by the artist himself in protest at gentrification.
