Grashina Gabelmann takes an alternative street art tour through Berlin’s Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain…

Image courtesy of The Hidden Path

There are lots of tours on offer in Berlin that describe themselves as alternative and promise to take you on the “path less trodden” — but something about The Hidden Path’s beautiful website, with its hand drawn elements, made its declaration seem more authentic.

The starting point of the tour was in front of ‘Casino 36′, a grimy and dodgy looking building covered in graffiti (how apt) which nearly gets swallowed up by all the busyness of Kottbusser Tor’s shopping and partying scenes. “I’ve got to change the meeting spot actually. Even Berliners don’t know where Casino 36 is,” says David Baumgarten, the amiable information-sponge, tour guide and founder of The Hidden Path.

As a “fresh off the boat” Berliner it made me feel a little bit pleased that I had strutted towards the casino without any confusion – but that’s where my knowledge of the ‘kiez’ (neighborhood) ended, as I was to discover.

As we walked up Adalbertstrasse towards our first street art stop, David explained the significance of Kreuzberg for Berlin’s street culture: “This area used to be known as SO36 (SO standing for South East) – the area’s former postal code. With the arrival of Turkish workers came racial violence, for example, in the form of skinhead gangs. The Turkish youth needed to defend themselves and so they formed gangs copying American names such as Black Panther and Warriors. The most famous were the 36 boys though. They’re not active anymore but have started this label…” he points to a tee-shirt filled store stocked with items proudly bearing the SO36 motif.

Image courtesy of The Hidden Path

I hadn’t expected to learn about Kreuzberg’s gang-filled past on this tour, but as it turns out David was full of such broad yet related insights. “You need to know a bit of the city’s complicated history in order to understand and appreciate its street art,” he clarifies, as if he’s in need of defending his enthusiastic sharing of facts.

Just around the corner from SO36 is the tour’s first street art stop – a house entrance whose walls are so covered in scribbles and sprays that my untrained eye would have swept right passed the dingy entrance, unable to spot the ‘real deal’ amongst all the messy tags. Strain your neck and you can see an El Bocho cut-out of two CCTV cameras: his signature contribution to Berlin and one of the more obvious messages out there.

Underneath it, another paste-up, is a €9,95 price tag. “Mr. Talion pastes these price tags next to street art in critique to those who steal, lets say a Banksy, only to sell it for a ton of money. Another thing he does is to paste dotted lines around a piece with a scissor as if to say ‘there you go! Everything is right here for you to take!’”

As we walk to the next spot David asks me if I’m aware of the difference between street art and graffiti. I think I might be, but it turns out I’m not. David explains how graffiti means a focus on letters and on tags – only a limited amount of people can read these letters so it isn’t very accessible and the message often isn’t meant for a large audience anyway; where street art uses stencils, paste-ups, sprays etc. and wants to grabs people’s attention and shows a certain urge and determination to be understood. This, along with all the art books David keeps pulling out of his bag like a magician pulling tricks from his sleeve, and the abundance of historical anecdotes that accompany our every step, helps make this a rich and multilayered tour.

We arrive at an enormous legal stenciling of an astronaut by Viktor Ash – a vast contrast to the quickly executed (albeit well-thought out) examples shown earlier. David makes sure to include every sort of street art on the tour: urban guerilla knitting, commissioned work by international street art superstars, stencils, tags made with fire extinguishers and animals made out of foam letters. “And if there is new art around I’ll change the tour a bit. You’ve got to be flexible. Street art is anything but static and the tour’s got to reflect that.”

Image courtesy of The Hidden Path

David started The Hidden Path about nine months ago. “I used to work for a tour company that focused a little bit on street art but I grew not to like the way the tours were run. It was about quantity, not quality. There would be twenty-eight people in one group. It’s impersonal and so you don’t get a chance to get to know people and that’s really important to me.

“I want to find out what people already know, why they are on the tour and what they want to learn and that just wasn’t possible. I was under pressure to send these people to certain cafes and pub crawls. It just wasn’t authentic or fun.”

David never takes more than eight to ten people on a tour and to make sure of this everyone has to call and book directly with him. The tour takes about three hours and will set you back €18 (€14 for students); which, personally, I find to be totally legitimate as David doesn’t just show you Kreuzberg’s and Friedrichshain’s street art but explains the neighborhoods’ history and shows you random locations that even born-and-bred Berliners don’t know about.

(A Kreuzbergian friend of mine, for example, didn’t know anything about the urban farm populated with chickens, ponies donkeys, sheep, goats and rabbits David had shown me, despite it being a short walking distance from his house; a visit to the farm is even sometimes possible, depending on the size of the group).

Some tours are built to shove large groups of tourists from one overcrowded destination to the next like a herd of animals but Hidden Path offers a stimulating alternative not just for tourists, art enthusiasts but also for Berlin locals; “I am yet to find a Berliner Hidden Path participant who did not learn something new on my tour,” smiles David proudly. And with the ever changing street art landscape, this statement could stand the test of time.

About The Author

Bio: Grashina Gabelmann is the Features Editor for illustration, music, art and DIY focused magazine Flamingo and a freelance travel and culture journalist with work published on Matador and The Expeditioner.

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