Book Fair Bits 2: Fear and Adrenaline in Frankfurt

Hauptwache means "Main Guard." The original baroque structure for Frankfurt's guards gave Hauptwache Square its name, but the building for Hauptwache 7 sports a tidy, non-Baroque sans serif. The quads to the right of the "7" echo the building's windows (which I like). Can you identify the type face? 

The "B" in the photo below is a mere visual amuse bouche from the Frankfurt Buchmesse convention grounds.

"Hope|Fear" is a tag that recurs in train stations and along the road to the center of Frankfurt, Germany.

Wanting to know more, I found "Against the Grey," a documentary about graffiti writers from Frankfurt. In an unwitting double entendre, the caption claims the video is "defiantly" worth checking out. It is indeed; the subjects in the film show a very thoughtful defiance. The video also shows: graffiti writers's addictive need to create art that springs from: sketching, influences of fellow artists and their surroundings, and research in magazines and online. An interviewee admits:

I really need it. Of course, it is illegal, but maybe you do it because of the adrenaline.

According to Atem (Il-Jin Choi), Frankfurt doesn't have enough legal art areas, which is "why graffiti writers go to Wiesbaden or Bad Vilbel or somewhere else." DNS Crew, hooded and looking like both terrorists and terrorized with a dash of Monty Python, discuss "danger of repression" as well as the crew's constant thinking about graffiti. Are the majority of taggers, like Atem, non-Teutonic? The masks don't reveal the answer.

Loving and creating beautiful things. Defacing. Producing more focused work spurred by adrenaline rushes. Defining self. The "signatures" of Rush, Atem and others are gorgeous. And Atem's quote about graffiti art and identity, despite the sub-title's ungrammatical lack of agreement, is poetic:

Every graffiti writer creates an act of self-baptism. They rename themselves.

The tag shown in my Hope/Fear photo (above) appears at 27:55 into the video. The artist of Hope says his drawing staves off depression or weltschmerz (in a blend of unlawful meeting existential, "weltschmerz" is one of his tags).

Instead of taking drugs, alcohol or violence, you can draw a piece with a dark slogan or picture to handle the stress.

Although many are illegal, the tags show the power of art and an urge to combat uniformity. Ironically, the video's titling is dull, due to that Everyman of Typography, Helvetica. Even with a tagger-like drop shadow, the film's title pales compared to the hand-painted tags.