Peter Lenk's sculpture "Peace Be With You"
on the taz building in Berlin

IT'S STORIES LIKE THIS that drive home just how different Europe and America can be from one another. On 15 November, 2009 the left-wing German newspaper Die Tageszeitung ("taz" for short) unveiled a provocative artwork by sculptor Peter Lenk on the exterior wall of its Kreuzberg headquarters featuring a naked man with a five-story, fifty-two foot porcelain male member that narrows into a cobra head at the tip. And the man depicted in the installation is not just any man, but Kai Diekmann, chief editor of the right-wing Bildzeitung, whose highrise headquarters is within spitting distance - with an unobstructed view of the artwork.

If you seek to understand what could motivate the management of a cash-strapped newspaper to invest a small fortune in such a bizarrely counterintuitive image you first need to know something about the German press. Diekmann's Bildzeitung, founded by publishing tycoon Axel Springer in  1952, is Europe's largest-circulation newspaper, selling three millions copies daily across forty-four countries. The Bild tabloid is to German newspapers what Fox News is to American TV. Decades before anyone in the US had ever heard of Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, Bild was already out there rousing the rabble with anti-communist horror stories, faux populist outrage about the latest public sex or finance scandal, lurid celebrity gossip, a lavish full-color sports section and, its most popular feature, a daily topless photo of a buxom blonde model on the back page. While it has gained a lot of competition in recent years through cable TV and the Internet, Bild is as big as ever and its role in fomenting anti-student outrage in the late 1960s and early 1970s remains legendary. The German Left still blames Springer and Bild for whipping up the hatred that led to the killing of student Benno Ohnesorg in 1967 and the assassination attempt on the revolutionary Rudi Dutschke in 1968. (Readers who have watched the German movie The Baader-Meinhof Complex will recall the dramatic scenes where young demonstrators try to storm Berlin's Bild headquarters and, later on, where the RAF explodes a bomb in its editorial offices). Bild is the newspaper the Left loves to hate, and out of sheer spite the district council of Kreuzberg renamed the street on which the building is located "Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse" in 2008. However, calling Bild "right-wing" only makes sense in the German context. After all, in America many of its editorial positions - particularly in regard to health care and the environment - would likely be regarded as somewhere to the left of Leon Trotsky. But in Germany, aside from the neo-Nazi press, Bild is about as "right" as the Right can be. And yet somehow, despite its daily excesses, Bild still manages to remain vaguely respectable, which drives its critics so utterly bonkers that they are even willing to shell out good money for... But I'm getting ahead of myself.

 
Stroking his ego:
Kai Diekmann, editor-in-chief of the Bildzeitung

The spunky and cooperatively-owned taz, by contrast, is Germany's premiere leftist rag, and while it sells a mere 65,000 copies a day, it regards itself as the messenger for all that is noble and progressive in the world and thus as Bild's natural rival. This has led to an almost daily tit-for-tat between the papers that is vaguely reminiscent of the rivalry between Fox News and MSNBC.

The idea for the unusual wall decoration first began to take shape back in 2002, when the taz published a satirical editorial poking fun at Diekmann's disastrous (and almost certainly apocryphal) penis enlargement surgery in Florida. The newspaper has also been known to make rude allusions to Diekmann's last name - while it is unremarkable in German, most people here know enough English to understand the joke. The tongue-in-cheek  Florida article was only one example of the constant sniping between the two papers. This time, however, Diekmann sued the newspaper for damages and lost, thus engorging a mild and otherwise forgettable jab in the ribs into a nationwide incident. Some time later, the taz cooperative decided to commission a suitable work of public art that would give this David-and-Goliath victory a visual and more or less permanent - and virile - form of expression.

The taz has made its point all right, but Diekmann may well end up having the last laugh. Somehow the cooperative thought it would be a good idea to award the commission to Peter Lenk, a sculptor from the shores of Lake Constance in southwestern Germany who had already made waves in the coastal town of Ludwigshafen in 2008 with a sculpture entitled "Global Players." It features five leading German politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, all stark naked and gleefully clutching each others' genitals. With a track record like that, it's hardly surprising that his latest masterpiece, "Friede sei mit dir" ("peace be with you"), now popularly known as "Der Pimmel über Berlin" ("the c**k over Berlin," a takeoff on Wim Wenders' film Der Himmel über Berlin, a.k.a. Wings of Desire) would not only raise eyebrows but also blood pressures - even inside taz headquarters itself.

 
Peter Lenk's sculpture "Global Players" (2008)
featuring  (from left to right) politicians Hans Eichel, Gerhard
Schröder, Chancellor Angela Merkel, Edmund Stoiber,
and Guido Westerwelle

Even though the new editor of the taz, Ines Pohl, began working for the paper just four months ago, she wants the sculpture gone yesterday. "If the artist Peter Lenk has his way, I'm going to have to lock up my bike every morning under a sixteen-meter-long schlong for the next two years," Pohl, a no-nonsense feminist, told Spiegel-online. "What a pathetic provocation. How tedious. I'm just not interested in this inflated smugness that revolves around the sad, never-ending male rivalry over who has the longest penis." Pohl's critique is bitterly ironic, since the original purpose of the sculpture was allegedly to provide "therapy for the sexual obsessions of the Bildzeitung." Indeed, the rest of the installation consists of caricatures based on vulgar headlines that have appeared in the newspaper over the decades, while a nude Friede Springer, the widow of founder Axel Springer and current publisher of Bild, sits at the top and "charms" Diekmann's "cobra" on a pipe. (The artwork's title "Friede sei mit dir," i.e. "Peace Be With You" is a pun on her name, since "Friede" also means "peace".) But the Diekmann caricature stands supreme over the rest. As Shakespeare might say, in unfurling Lenk's installation the taz has been "hoist with its own petard."

 
Not amused:
Feminist and taz editor Ines Pohl

But it isn't just Pohl who has been left frigid by Lenk's display. Complaints are swelling, both among readers and Berliners in general, as the already flailing taz meekly collapses into two roughly equal factions - pro and anti. But neither Pohl nor the other opponents have any real say in the matter, since the taz is managed by its feisty and heavily ideological cooperative, few of whose members want to back away from this bracing encounter with their tails between their legs. After all, taking offense at the image is just so "bourgeois." But now even Diekmann, who was admittedly taken aback by the project at first, has since learned to play along with the taz's banter - the sculpture "strokes my ego," he wrote in his blog. He even joined the cooperative himself six months ago, which has provided him with a full frontal view of the ongoing self-abuse of his favorite rival.  And when the issue came to a climax at a cooperative meeting in late November, he duly cast his vote, going along with the majority in giving Lenk's sculpture a rousing heads-up.

 
Detail of "Peace Be With You"

In any case, the newest member to join the Brandenburg Gate and Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin's august club of public monuments is unlikely to shrink away anytime soon: the taz is contractually obliged to keep it up for at least two years. Otherwise the increasingly flaccid daily would have to pay Lenk 130,000 Euros in compensation. Lenk himself admits that he is enjoying a good laugh over the controversy, regretting only that his sculpture had to be so small. "To reflect the acceptance the Bildzeitung enjoys among the elite, I would have required a surface taller than the Victory Column," he said in an interview. Berlin's Victory Column, with its iconic golden angel on top, is 222 feet high.

So Lenk's latest erection is here to stay, although this extended joke is fast losing its tone. The only question that remains is: What will Lenk, the taz or anyone else in this country do next time to provoke a reaction? I have no idea - but you can be sure that someone is hard at work on it this very moment.

You can watch a German-language video report on "Peace Be With You" here.