The graffiti in the Stasi remand prison Berlin-Hohenschönhausen show that – in spite of extraordinary repressive conditions – people risked scratching into the whitewashed walls during the last years and months of the GDR. Markings that remain date from about 1987-1990. Many of the graffiti are just lines: tally markings, or other markings without symbolic content but on one occasion letters from two sides of a cell came together to form a name, a blues musician. Most are anonymous.

The prison is now an educational memorial. The administration gave me solitary access to the cells from 2016 – 2022 and I recorded all the markings I could find in different conditions, times of day and seasons. I also worked with other kinds of evidence. Inmates sometimes read books, which Stasi interrogators loaned to them, and both left markings in the texts. A version of To Kill a Mockingbird featured here is an example of this unequal exchange. The images below represent four field notebooks of actual-sized tracings of the markings inside cells. Instead of proceeding with an art project, I enrolled with my research as a case study for a doctoral degree in Classical Archaeology at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. The notebooks form the basis of a methodology for analysing nonsymbolic graffiti.

For more information on these please refer to my publications, especially this one.