Stickerkitty

For my new geo-tagging project, I’m trying to come up with a manageable number of consistent subject terms to describe what a sticker is about, i.e., what people in library and information science call creating an authority control or set of keywords (index terms).  One can go a little crazy in this endeavor, because there are so many comprehensive guides to refer to, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings, the Getty Research Institute Art & Architecture Thesaurus, various ARTstor Subject Guides, and plain old common sense.  My goal is to narrow it down to about 20 keywords, and here is what I have so far (22): Animal Rights; Authority; Capitalism; Conflict/War; Demonstration/Protest; Economy; Education; Environment; Gender; Globalization; Government/Politics; Identity; Immigration; Labor; Music; Nationalism; Race/Ethnicity; Religion; Sports; Surveillance; Technology; and Urban Development (includes Anti-Tourism, Gentrification, Reclaim the Streets).  Or to keep it simple, in most cases I could just put Power/Control.

There are also other terms that I want to include that describe how a sticker functions and/or what rhetorical strategy was used to create it.  This list is much shorter and still needs work: Advertising/Publicity; Adbusting/Appropriation/Culture Jamming; Creative Expression; D-I-Y; Humor/Irony/Satire; Postal/Hello-My-Name-Is; and Tagging.

Here below, for example, is one sticker that I’ve tagged.  The title of the sticker, “Weissagung der Mieter” means “The Tenants’ Prophecy,” and the text reads “Erst wenn der letzte Mieter verdrängt, der letzte Stadtteil gentrifiziert, das letzte Stück Berlins verkauft ist, werdet ihr merken, dass man Stadt nicht ohne uns machen kann,” or roughly, “Only when the last tenants are displaced, the last quarter is gentrified, the last piece of Berlin is sold, you will realize that you can not do without our city.”  My initial tags included: Capitalism; Economy; and Urban Development (includes Anti-Tourism, Gentrification, Reclaim the Streets).  Since the sticker has a Web site listed on it, www.kottico.net, I also included Advertising/Publicity.

When I went to the Web site, I learned that there is a group called “Kotti & Co” that was formed in May 2012 in the working class Kottbusser Tor district in Berlin-Kreuzberg, an area populated largely by residents from Turkey.  In fact, Berlin is the largest city of Turks outside of Turkey, according to Eva Spirova in an article entitled The Multicultural Kreuzberg on the blog Berlin: A Divided City.  Germany developed an official Turkish recruitment agreement in 1961, which has since brought in millions of guest workers.  The project has been “an unnecessary social, economic and political catastrophe” however, for the workers’ children and grandchildren who can’t find jobs and are often socially marginalized, according to Klaus Bade of the German Foundations on Integration and Migration.  For more information, see At Home In a Foreign Country: German Turks Struggle to Find Their Identity in Der Spiegel (November 2, 2011).

As a result of this research, I’ll now add these tags: Demonstration/Protest; Government/Politics; Identity; Immigration; Labor; Nationalism; Race/Ethnicity; and Religion.  This happens all the time – finding what at first glance appear to be modest little stickers with such powerful and far-reaching commentary!  It can be somewhat daunting….  I hope, though, that I’ll be able to assign stickers into various groups and the work will go a little faster.  Like these:

As a side note, another article, Graffiti and Street Art, on the blog above states that “…stickers and adhesives are not considered graffiti.”!

Yesterday while biking along the Rathausstraße, a popular restaurant and shopping area in Alexanderplatz, I came across several anti-Muslim stickers that are too offensive to post on Stickerkitty.  I’ve been debating what to do and how to write about them in a neutral and ethical way.  Posting offensive images can be a dangerous thing, I think, even if I were to simply describe what was going on in the stickers (i.e., what is being represented and/or communicated).  The stickers were out in public and in plain view, but posting them online seems different.

I’ll share a little of what could be considered acceptable in this situation, though.  When I was there, I took a few photographs and learned that last year, right near where I was standing, a 20-year-old Vietnamese man had been badly beaten and later died.  A shrine with candles and flowers has been created to honor him.

You can read about the incident in The Local (October 15, 2012) and Der Spiegel (October 17, 2012).  At the time, the alleged perpetrators were identified as “southern Europeans,” though in a more recent story in Der Welt (May 13, 2013), six suspects have been named, with one, a Turk, identified as the main perpetrator.  He fled to Turkey after the beating and returned to Germany just a few days ago to be charged with the murder.

One of the stickers that I found in the area read, “Nur ein toter Muslim ist ein guter Muslim,” or “Only a dead Muslim is a good Muslim.”  Another sticker showed the silhouette of a mosque and the words above it, “Gegen Islam[i]s[i]erung” or “Against Islamization.”  Instead of the letter “i,” were tall minarets.  The sticker also included “2045 werden 52 Mio Muslime in Deutschland leben!” or “In 2045, 52 million Muslims will be living in Germany!” and a Web site for <pi news dot net>.  PI stands for Politically Incorrect.  That’s all I’m going to say about these stickers.  The others were much, much worse.

At the end of the block where I was walking, I found a recognizable sticker image from Storch Heinar that read “Hier Verschwand ein Nazi-Aufkleber” or roughly “Here disappeared a Nazi sticker.”  The sticker (though now in my notebook) did indeed cover an offensive anti-Muslim sticker.

Storch Heinar, with his little Hitler moustache, is a word play on Thor Steinar, a German clothing company that has been criticized for a logo and other designs that are very similar to what were used on SS uniforms during World War II.  Thor Steinar clothing has been banned in government buildings and several football (soccer) stadiums in Germany.  You can read more about Thor Steinar in a previous post.  Doing research today, I found an informative article by Simon Englar that discusses right-wing clothing and a group in Berlin, Rechtes Land, which tracks right-wing and neo-Nazi activities across Germany.  According to Englar,

• “Rechtes Land, or ‘Just Nation,’ is a database of present and historical far-right activity that will be displayed geographically in a searchable map online.  Every beating, every murder, every bombing—Rechtes Land aims to cover it all, in a consolidated and accessible interface.  But the data mapped won’t be limited to events of official illegality.  Felix Hansen [one of the organizers] explained that the project will also map marches and rallies—events which are technically legal, but which play an important role in the far-right scene.  ‘Whether or not [right-wing] groups have broken the law plays no role for us,’ explained Hansen.  It’s with this understanding that Rechtes Land will pay close attention to the commercialized far right.  Brands like Thor Steinar… will be mapped, their networks of distribution exposed….  That’s a new level of exposure for the German far right—an exposure that will be meticulously catalogued and documented.  Rechtes Land follows a simple logic: exposure is necessary for awareness, for research, and, ultimately, for policy.  This strategy of exposure is particularly well suited to Germany, where the most successful far-right groups tend to be dispersed and obscure.”

Interesting how this mapping relates to my geo-tagging project, too.  I looked at Rechtes Land, and markers identify where right-wing activities have taken place (marches, demonstrations), who were the organizers, their mottos or chants, how many participants, etc., as well as news items and a rich collection of historical Nazi sites and more contemporary post-World War II monuments, museums, and documentation centers, such as the Topography of Terror.

What a great way to learn about the political history of the city.  I’m going to ask people at Rechtes Land about the anti-Muslim stickers I found.  Maybe they will want to add photos of them to their Web site.

Geo-tagging digital photographs is getting easier and more complicated.  My new and evolving work flow goes like this.  Rather than photograph any or every sticker that comes my way (it’s laborious to turn on/off the GPS settings every time, and I come across 100s of stickers a day, anyway), I’m learning to photograph stickers at a particular location and let that group of stickers tell the story.  Yesterday, for example, I was walking along Torstraße in Prenzlauer Berg and came to a corner café with signs that read “BAIZ Bleibt!” (or “BAIZ remains”), a phrase I’d already seen on a handful of stickers.  According to their Facebook site, BAIZ is an “alternative cultural institution in the BAIZ Sandtorstrasse… punishable by the purchase of the house by the investor group Zelos Properties GmbH.  But that we, the guests, not resign ourselves!”  (Sorry for rough Google translation.)

I took a left onto Christinenstraße and Lottumstraße situated a few blocks near Senefelder Platz (hello, birthplace of lithography in the 1790s!) and Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (hello, political revolutionary in the early 1900s!).  It’s captivating to feel the magnitude of history at any given corner in Berlin and one of the things I love about this city….  Just think: printmaking and politics (i.e., the great-great+ grandparents of stickers) go back hundreds of years right at this locale.

While there, I photographed about a dozen political stickers, which you can see on my new Stickerkitty map.  If you click on any of the images on the bar along the bottom of the screen, it will show you where on the street the photograph was taken.  Here is one of the stickers with the “BAIZ Bleibt” motto.

Other than the rash of political stickers, there was nothing out of the ordinary along this quiet stretch of the neighborhood.  A few bicyclists rode by, and parents were walking home with their kids after school.  The big elephant on the street, however, was a huge multi-storey crane working on a building demo and/or renovation.  Construction workers loaded their cars at the end of the workday.  Cranes and construction workers are ubiquitous in Berlin, but now I understand why the stickers were there to protest urban development.  The geo-tagging is giving me an opportunity to look at the time and spatial placement of stickers in a new way.  I like how the quantitative data leads to a qualitative description.