Drizzling rain, booing and a lot of black paint – a gloomy mood lay over the banks of the Spree in December 2014, when a Berlin art association painted over a huge house wall in Kreuzberg unannounced. Until then, the murals, visible from afar, had been very popular motifs for photos and postcards. They stood for a Berlin full of possibilities, for a metropolis in the middle of Europe that was comparatively affordable and seemed to offer free spaces for everyone.
When the famous murals were painted over in black, the art association explained: "We felt that seven years after they were created, it was time for these paintings to disappear (...) – they stood for an era in Berlin’s history that is fading, and now they are dying together." What had happened?
The properties at the Cuvrystraße had been an empty space for decades. Due to wartime destruction and division, Berlin in the 1990s was nowhere near as densely built up as other big cities in Europe. West Berlin’s insular location made the city unattractive for private investments for a long time. Even after reunification, many areas remained vacant because of the poor economic situation. The Cuvry-Brache was one of the last of its kind in Kreuzberg. The riverbank here is easily accessible and serves as a popular spot for photos of sunsets over the Oberbaumbrücke. Until 2014, homeless people, dropouts and migrant workers inhabited a wild camp on the site. Conflicts with residents and authorities eventually led to eviction.
The adjacent windowless walls of the buildings provided a gigantic open-air canvas. Two of the murals were visible from afar for seven years, for example, from the Oberbaumbrücke over the Spree, which thousands pass daily. One image showed a giant man wearing a suit, handcuffed with gold wristwatches while putting on his tie. In the other artwork, two white-masked figures were in the process of removing each other’s masks. Their hands formed the signs for "Eastside" and "Westside", a reference to the formerly divided city.
The pictures were created in 2007 by the Italian street artist BLU. In 2014, it was he who finally also agreed to paint over the walls in black, shortly after the wild camp had been cleared. He wanted to prevent the investor, who planned to build expensive apartments on the wasteland, from profiting from his works. So the art disappeared first under black paint, then behind new buildings. The banks of the Spree continue to change. With its condensed cityscape, Berlin is becoming more and more like other metropolises.
