BERLIN: He survived the fall of communism but the trials and tribulations of the traffic light man from the former East Germany are far from over. Two businessmen — one from eastern Germany and one from the west — are now waging a patent rights battle over the Ampelmann which the press has played up as proof of the tension between the two parts of the once-divided country.
Markus Heckhausen, a designer from Tuebingen in southern Germany, moved to Berlin in 1995 and two years later began selling anything from t-shirts to fridge magnets, flip-flops and fruit drops bearing the Ampelmann — who was named after the German word for traffic light.
By then the Germans in the former East, or Ossis, had won the battle to keep their iconic little figure with his hat and his arms spread wide in warning when the light is red.
Initially after the Iron Curtain fell, the German authorities wanted to replace him with the skinnier, less expressive traffic symbol used in the rest of Germany.
But residents of the East founded a committee that fought hard to prevent another part of their culture from being swallowed up in the reunification process.
Today there are even areas in western Berlin where broken traffic lights have been replaced with ones featuring the inimitable Ampelmann.
“The Ossis said that one could not do away with everything that set them apart. Especially since it was something rather fun,” Heckhausen told AFP.
The Ampelmann was created in 1961 by traffic psychologist Karl Peglau after an increase in cars in the former East made the streets more dangerous.
Peglau wanted a symbol that would appeal to children and could easily be read by the elderly. He deliberately made the figure as clear, and cute, as possible.
And so the Ampelmann became a much-loved figure in East Germany decades before he would become something of a mascot for Berlin and one of the tourist attractions of the new German capital.
The 1980s saw a television series in which a cartoon Ampelmann explained traffic rules to East German children and around the same time an East Berlin-based businessman, Joachim Rossberg, began selling Ampelmann memorabilia.
Rossberg and Heckhausen are now facing each other in court.—AFP
