How clear is art allowed to be when it is used to criticize armaments companies? Our author has some experience with this delicate subject. The Column.
In the next few weeks, the Heidelberg Justice Center will be showing some posters that have resulted in more than forty legal proceedings in my career. There will also be a discussion on the topic: “How Klaus Staeck explored the limits of artistic freedom” at the vernissage this Thursday at the same location. So much for the advertising block on our own behalf.
What can perhaps be easily debated today was a phase in my professional life that can only be described as life-threatening. In 1968, although I was admitted to the bar at the Heidelberg district court, I was drawn in a completely different direction. “Autodidact as an artist”, I wrote in my early catalog pages. After all, that was enough for a later professorship in Düsseldorf, when some of my posters and campaigns had achieved a certain level of awareness in the Federal Republic.
But then the near crash, even if only one of the lawsuits against me, for which Rheinmetall was the plaintiff, would have ended differently. Her law firm accused me of “considerable discrimination against her client” because I wanted to give the impression with the picture of her managing directors that they were against the peace, even though their activities serve to preserve the peace. I had modified the well-known Deutsche Bahn motif “Everyone is talking about the weather – we are not” and commented on a photo of the gentlemen from the top management presenting their grenades with the text “Everyone is talking about peace – we are not”. Two days after it was printed in “Spiegel”, Rheinmetall applied to the district court of Heidelberg for the poster to be withdrawn and for immense claims for damages. I failed to comply with a restraining order.
I am still grateful to my colleagues from the legal faction for the consistency with which they advocated that they plead for an “exaggeration allowed for satirical art”. Other objections and complaints from the Rheinmetall director were also rejected because it is not important “that every viewer recognizes the work as satire, because every satire runs the risk of being misjudged by those who have no sense for it”. Anyone who has such clever judges needs no defense attorneys.
However, Rheinmetall was determined to go through all the instances: Frankfurt Regional Court, Kassel Higher Regional Court – the managers from the armaments industry ultimately failed with all requests for a ban. The press, radio and television reported and commented extensively until some of the leaders in the arms trade realized that too much publicity could only damage the guild’s actually discreet business practices. The company’s last announcement justified the cessation of its legal activities with the fact that these would “exclusively lead to an unnecessary revaluation of this now unambiguously politically qualified ‘art'”. I had won one game, but it wasn’t the only trial I had to face.
How would Rheinmetall react today? Now that she wants to almost double sales to twelve billion euros by 2025 in her high on the stock exchange? Financial markets are talking about a “quantum leap” for the German armaments industry. Calls for the introduction of a “war economy” can even be heard from the military and politicians. Good or bad times for satire?
Klaus Staeck is a graphic designer and columnist.
