Bitte Lebn (Please Live).
This was the one piece of graffiti or street art (depends how you look at it) in Berlin that for me summarizes it all: Please Live. On top of an apartment block it looks really dreadful at first glance, but the message is powerful and for me carries the full history of the city of Berlin.
Berlin is all about street art. Photographers walk around the city, searching for new pieces of graffiti. Some call it street art, others are ashamed of this kind of city pollution. Well, at the very least they are all messages coming from another side of society.
I don’t have to explain you about the history of Berlin and specifically the Berlin Wall. But when you walk around the city, I want you to notice the messages. They are messages about peace, about lessons from the past, about why you can live a happy life with what you’ve got. “Today is a gift”, seems to be a good caption for this street art.
A great place to start watching street art is the East Side Gallery where the longest still standing piece of the Berlin Wall is situated. Artists used the remains of the Wall to create outdoor masterpieces. It’s quite popular and maybe you have seen many of these images before (like me). Still these poets of imagery keep drawing my attention, remembering me about freedom.
At the end of this open-air museum, cross the famous Oberbaum bridge and walk a bit around Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg to watch more recent (and less cultivated) street art.
You can call it city pollution, but reality is that this has become a part of the city. Berlin is a city of extremes and some of its inhabitants are still reaching out to the public to speak out. You could conclude that Berlin is searching for its real identity where groups are still not aligned. What do you think?
Please do check out the other posts about Berlin on this blog:
• Remembering Berlin
• Berlin – Poor but Sexy
• Berlin – 10 Great things to do (with kids) part 1
• Berlin – 10 Great things to do (with kids) part 2
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