Yesterday evening I took a long walk and a lot of pictures of campaign posters for next Sunday’s regional election. After all, next Monday, they will be gone.
So this poster is the first in the series I’m going to post over the next days – think of them as some kind of election calendar.
This “ingenous” poster reading “Deutsch ist geil” is making use of a word play, “geil” being a slang (well, not just slang anymore) word meaning “great” as well as “horny” in high German. The latter, of course, explains the presence of the young lady on the picture, although it is hard to see what in particular is German or “geil” about her. She’s smiling, but I doubt her expression justifies the use of either meaning of “geil”.
The next interesting question is why the “Republikanische Jugend” (the “Young Republicans”), apparently the youth organisation of the (extreme) right wing party “Die Republikaner”, or “REP”, chose the claim “German is horny/great” instead of “Germany is horny/great” (apart from the lack of space on the poster, of course), for I doubt they are really referring to the sexyness of the German language, which I have repeatedly written about before.
Germany, of course, is more likely to be horny than great these days, particularly given the anticipated rise in both testosterone and working girls during the world cup this summer. On the other hand, I don’t really believe the young republicans are trying to imply the superior horniness of German prostitutes over their non-German colleagues. However, this could be construed as an advertisement advocating protectionism in the horizontal business. After all, the influx of “guest workers” from low income countries has most likely had some impact on the going rates for sexual services.
But the most probable interpretation is that they were just trying to get some attention by displaying female breasts, a strategy as commonly used as ineffective in modern advertisement. And attaching this poster to a lamp, 3 meters above ground, right next to a well photographed 18m2 erotic advertisement for a lingerie company doesn’t help either…
Interestingly, the only advertisements attached that high were from one of the two extreme right wing parties. And while there is a system of ad-space allocation between the running parties – and the right wing parties certainly won’t get a lot of decent spots given their near non-relevance – I doubt they have been forced to advertise almost entirely outside of the range of the human eye. So I suppose they must have had some reason to do this, although I don’t know which one.