Sun-Sentinel, 24.07.2003

Strange but true, naked plastic men give Germans food for thought

Reuters

BERLIN -- A new traveling art exhibition consisting of naked crouching plastic men is prompting Germans to reflect on their troubled economy and turbulent history.

Artist Claudia Rogge, 38, from Duesseldorf, is driving the 66 life-size figures around Berlin on the back of a glass-sided truck, with the aim of provoking a spontaneous public response.

``I don't want to give a message with it,'' she said. ''Everyone is entitled to their own opinions.''

Rogge said most onlookers tended to put a negative spin on the ranks of semi-prostrate beige forms. She has been parking the truck at various tourist attractions in the city.

``What's really surprised me is that it's been associated with the state of the German economy - that we are stooped and vulnerable. People also see Germany on her knees in history.''

To the older generation, the work strikes a sinister chord with the past. ``For older people there is also Auschwitz,'' she said, referring to the Nazi death camp where nearly 1.5 million Jews died in gas chambers in World War Two.

Rogge will take her team of dummies on a tour of Europe this summer, following a similar rolling art exhibition she staged last year, when she courted controversy by filling a truck with plastic babies' heads peering out the sides.

Then, the babies evoked the horror of pedophilia in Belgium and the bloody legacy of the French Revolution in Paris.