Freedom costs peanuts

This is also the context in which we should read Haacke’s contri­bu­tion. The tower symbol­ized the East, the star the West. The montage posed various ques­tions: How can the different systems unite? Can indi­vidual elements be combined? Or will misun­der­stand­ings arise and like­wise unin­ten­tional over­laps? The posi­tioning of the star on top suggests the prophecy that the economic (control) system will replace the prior polit­ical one.

In the summer of 1990, Haacke’s “Watch­tower” project high­lighted the predom­i­nant posi­tion of the West and the capi­tal­iza­tion of the East. In fact, he outfitted the tower with a symbol of consumerism precisely at the very moment the Wall itself became a consumer commodity. On June 20, 1990, Sotheby’s in Monte Carlo auctioned off 81 indi­vidual sections of the Wall for up to 30,000 Deutschmarks each, with the total proceed­ings coming to two million Deutschmarks.

The star specif­i­cally points to the activ­i­ties of the Daimler-Benz corpo­ra­tion in Berlin in 1990: In the summer of that year, the company had acquired prime real estate on Pots­damer Platz for a tenth of the esti­mated value. This was a matter of public debate as early as 1990, and Haacke’s “Watch­tower” locked into this debate, crit­i­cizing the company and the over­hasty actions of the Berlin munic­ipal govern­ment. Two years later, the corpo­ra­tion had to make a subse­quent payment of 33.8 million euros, as the monop­o­lies commis­sion had declared that the purchase price broke the law. An ironic adver­tising column, there­fore, for Daimler-Benz: This inter­pre­ta­tion of the watch­tower is supported by the slogans “Kunst bleibt Kunst” and “Bereit sein ist alles”, which drew on two of the corpo­ra­tion’s then ad slogans and brought to mind the East German boy-scout motto.

Finally, the star clearly alluded to another Berlin building: On the roof of the Europa Center at the top of Kurfürsten­damm, a corre­sponding, if far larger, Mercedes star still rotates to this day. During the days of the divided city, it symbol­i­cally ensured West Berlin partic­i­pated in West Germany’s flour­ishing economy.

September 2016 saw me fly to New York to meet Hans Haacke and inter­view him. Born in 1936 in Cologne, he studied in Kassel, which was part of the “Zonen­randge­biet”, or zonal border, 30 kilo­me­ters from the border with East Germany. Since 1965 he has lived in the USA, but reads “Der Spiegel” maga­zine every week and remains in close contact with friends and colleagues. We met again in Athens for the opening of docu­menta 14 in spring 2017. For this show, he had returned to his idea for Leipzig: A banner and 10,000 posters were ille­gally glued to walls in Athens, on street corners and in public spaces. The poster boasted 12 lines of “We (all) are the people”, written black on white in various fonts and languages. In Kassel, the theme unset­tled things, appearing on count­less bill­boards and ad spaces.

The choice of languages reflected the respec­tive percentage of migrants and displaced persons in Greece and in Germany, Haacke explained: “The banner rein­forces our bond with all migrants and displaced persons who at present are exposed to viru­lent xeno­phobia, racism, and life-threat­ening reli­gious conflicts in many coun­tries in the world.” The rainbow that framed the block of text gave the state­ment an appealing touch and is remi­nis­cent of the rainbow flag, which stands for the advent of the new, for peace, and for the accep­tance of different, indi­vidual ways of life.

Since docu­menta 14, “Wir (alle) sind das Volk” has been seen on banners, posters, and post­cards in Brus­sels, Ghent, New York, Bratislava, and Ramallah, not to mention in Leipzig, Zwickau, Halle, Dresden, Chem­nitz, Stuttgart, Berlin, and Weimar. As part of the Hans Haacke retro­spec­tive at the SCHIRN, the decen­tral piece is now also present in Frank­furt’s urban space.

Where Haacke’s Mercedes star illu­mi­nated the no-man’s land killing zone back in 1990, in recent years a new resi­den­tial district has arisen. The brochure adver­tising the new condo­miniums for sale high­lights the site’s history: “The Luisen­park Berlin-Mitte quarter is pres­ti­gious, urban, and truly histor­ical, since the Berlin Wall ran exactly along Stallschreiber­strasse, which borders the district.”