Wolf Vostell
Deutsche Studen­tentapete

Deutsche Studententapete (German Student Wallpaper), produced using a rotary printing process, is based on a page from the weekly magazine Stern about the demonstrations on June 2, 1967 against the Iranian Shah’s state visit to Berlin. The found motif is enlarged to the width of a roll of wallpaper and printed countless times on around 2000 meters of a roll of paper. In place of the magazine title on the header of the magazine page is the information about the edition: “Wolf Vostell, Deutsche Studententapete, Edition 8, Galerie Block, Berlin 1967”.
With Deutsche Studententapete, Vostell reacted directly to the recent political events that had shaken the Federal Republic in the summer of 1967. The protests against the visit from Iran, in which leading students from Berlin’s universities took part, were repressed by the Berlin police with massive violence. On the evening of June 2, 1967, German studies student Benno Ohnesorg was shot dead near the Deutsche Oper by Berlin police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras (identified in 2009 as an unofficial member of the Stasi) after protesters blocked access to the Deutsche Oper for the state visit. The page from the weekly magazine Stern, which Vostell places on the rolls of paper as a seemingly endlessly repeating motif, ran the headline “The beaten fight back” under the photo of a woman covered in blood and injured in the head in front of the Deutsche Oper. The article reports on how students at Freie Universität are now actually fighting back by identifying individual police officers and pressing charges against them.
“The wallpaper is particularly suitable as wall decoration in university foyers, supermarkets and police stations,” reads an edition sheet from Galerie René Block, which also shows the wallpaper as “wall decoration” in a homely setting with a bouquet of flowers and a television set. The invitation card to Vostell’s exhibition at Galerie Block also refers to two of the artist’s actions: On October 13 and 14, 1967, Vostell offers ten-meter-long sections of the printed wallpaper rolls for sale to students in front of the refectory of the Free University and the entrance to the Technical University of Berlin and signs these pieces at the buyers’ request.
The following day, the edition Deutsche Studententapete is presented as part of the opening of Vostell’s solo exhibition Out of Focus. Portraits von K. Adenauer, H. Albertz, L.B. Johnson, B. Ohnesorg, H. Lübke at Galerie Block. On the evening of the opening, Vostell continued the campaign and sold sections of Deutsche Studententapete directly from the roll. The edition Deutsche Studententapete is published as a roll with sections of ten meters, provided with a banderole on which the details of the edition and the number of 200 copies are indicated.
Text: Birgit Eusterschulte