Writing upon History: West German Graffiti and 1968

This article reassesses the role and subsequent historicization of West German graffiti in 1968. Through an examination of the instability of graffiti's liminal place in West German histories of writing and protest, I will showcase how this fringe media circulated and intervened into conventional formats of protest literature in 1968, but also how the contemporary West German imaginary took cursory surfaces and materialities into account. Although ephemera like the street flyer or poster were disseminated and discarded in 1968, the specific kind of ephemerality inherent to graffiti confounded the boundaries of what was deemed literary then and how it has been preserved ever since.