72 pages Edited by Volker Barthelmeh 22,2 x 23,3 cm Language: German Paperback Publisher: Verlag Dieter Fricke 1980
An early and authoritative survey of the mural movement in West Germany, documenting the wave of community and political wall painting that swept the Bundesrepublik through the 1970s. Written by Volker Barthelmeh — who two years later would publish Street Murals (1982), one of the first international overviews of the form — the book gathers and analyses large-scale painted walls across West German cities, situating them within the wider international muralism of the period, from Chicago and Mexico to the Chilean brigades. It treats the wall not as a surface for signatures but as a public canvas for collective statement.
For a graffiti and street-art library, its value is as a precursor document: a record of German wall art in the years just before spray-can writing arrived from New York and reshaped the country's streets in the mid-1980s. It captures the muralist impulse — image, message, neighbourhood, participation — that the later graffiti generation would both inherit from and react against. Long out of print and seldom seen outside German-language collections, it remains a useful primary reference for the prehistory of German street art.
