IN RECENT YEARS Berlin has gained a reputation of being the “graffiti capital of the world.” Graffiti writings, however, have been present in West Berlin at least since the 1970s, when countless tags, slogans, and colorful images covered the Berlin Wall and turned the barrier between East and West into a world-famous icon of the divided city and the Cold War. The western side, with its colorful expressions of free speech, stood in stark contrast to the bare, sterile eastern side, with its corresponding oppressive atmosphere. Several West Berlin neighborhoods, especially Kreuzberg, the city's former peripheral outpost running along a section of the wall and home to alternative subcultures and a strong multiethnic population, likewise saw numerous graffiti writings scratched and painted on house facades before it was opened in the fall of 1989 (fig. 5.1). Kreuzberg was the creative, anarchic center of a city that had a special, nearly autonomous status in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) as an island surrounded by the German Democratic Republic (GDR). During the 1980s, Kreuzberg served as a center for free speech, alternative lifestyles, social unrest, and protest against norms and conventions, in short, the “epicenter of counterculture” (Mandel 141). The city, dramatically transformed in the postwall era, has undoubtedly assigned new meanings to graffiti, which spread widely and today can be found all over what are now centrally located neighborhoods, especially Kreuzberg, Mitte, Friedrichshain, Prenzlauer Berg, and Neukölln. Graffiti has become a formative component of Berlin's postwall urban landscape and a critical voice in a highly contested location at the height of a process of urban renewal and social unrest.

This chapter explores the connection between the phenomenon of illegal (and therefore transgressive) graffiti writings and recent trajectories in urban development in Germany's capital. Graffiti writers and street artists comment critically on current challenges to solving social problems intrinsically linked to globalization and urban transformations such as rising rents and displacement (Verdrängung). Graffiti represents precisely the kinds of ethical appeals that sociologist Ulrich Beck has in mind when he reminds us of the need to address social and environmental concerns, as well as economic inequalities, deriving from the way the globalized Western world operates (285–334).