The white line

The white line (sometimes also known as the White Line Action ) was the name of an art campaign with which on November 3rd and 4th 1986 five artists from the GDR who had traveled to West Berlin wanted to draw attention to the wall . They wanted to paint the entire wall with a clearly visible white line to take away its easel character, because in their opinion the wall paintings played down the actual function of the building. At the same time, the action was intended to make clear the limitation that the wall meant for the life of the West Berlin population. The five wall painters were Frank Willmann , Wolfram Hasch, Frank Schuster and Thomas and Jürgen Onißeit. They came from Weimar , where they had met in the subculture of hippies and punks.

The wall painters wore masks to make themselves unrecognizable. On the second day, three GDR border guards who had come through a concealed door in the wall hid in the undergrowth of the zoo . Wolfram Hasch was the first to reach the height of the hiding place, which was still on East Berlin territory, and was arrested. The action was then canceled. Hasch was sentenced to 20 months in prison, which he was supposed to serve in Bautzen prison. After seven months, in June 1987, he was ransomed by the Federal Republic of Germany . It was his second term in a GDR prison for political reasons; In 1984 the then 20-year-old was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for preparing a flyer in Weimar.

When researching files to reconstruct what had happened, it turned out that one of the five participants, as an informant for the Ministry for State Security , had spied on parts of the Weimar subculture until 1984. In 2011 a traveling exhibition about this action was shown for the first time in the Bautzen Memorial .

In 2014, Gerd Kroske published the documentary Striche Draw at the DOC Leipzig . From the German Film and Media Assessment (FBW) it received the rating of particularly valuable .

literature

• Anne Hahn , Frank Willmann (ed.): The white line - prehistory and consequences of an art action on the Berlin Wall. Chr. Links-Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-86153-651-2 .

Web links

• Page about the action at the Bautzen memorial
• White line on Berlin Wall angry GDR regime. ( Memento from September 11, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) In: Freie Presse Chemnitz from August 11, 2011
• When a white line made the wall a political issue. In: Welt-online from August 1, 2011, article about the campaign with various pictures
• Website for the film
• http://www.berliner-mauer-strich.de/

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Axel Stefek: 1984. Call for election boycott. In: Ders .: Weimar unadjusted. Resistant behavior 1950–1989 (= Weimarer Schriften , vol. 68). Weimar: Stadtmuseum, 2014, ISBN 978-3-910053-56-4 , pp. 97-106.
2. ↑ Tania Carlin: Striche Draw Film interview, achtung berlin 2015. Festival TV, accessed on June 11, 2015 . 
3. ↑ Christiane Peitz: The brother, the Stasi and the door in the wall. In: Der Tagesspiegel . April 19, 2015, accessed June 11, 2015 . 
4. ↑ Draw lines. A wall art campaign in West Berlin in 1986 with consequences. Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk , April 21, 2015, archived from the original on April 15, 2015 ; Retrieved May 25, 2016 . 
5. ↑ Draw lines. FBW press release. FBW , accessed June 11, 2015 . 
6. ↑ On the resistance. In: Friday . April 22, 2015, accessed June 11, 2015 .