Alle reden vom Wetter.
Wir nicht
—

In the autumn of 1966, the prestigious advertising agency McCann Erickson was commissioned to develop a new campaign for the Deutsche Bundesbahn, the state-owned railroad company in western Germany. They had to launch a concrete and direct message: the train as a form of public transport, efficient and punctual, regardless of the weather or any other external factor.

Thus, they constructed the famous series of graphic advertising pieces featuring a Deutsche Bundesbahn Baureihe E10 electric locomotive driving through a snowstorm, accompanied by the text that gives the piece its title: Alle reden vom Wetter. Wir nicht [Everyone talks about the weather. We don’t].

In early 1968, the artists Jürgen Holtfreter and Ulrich Bernhardt, students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, would launch their own version of the poster, now with the faces of the three totes of Marxism (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir I. Ulyanov “Lenin”), and signed by the German Socialist Student Federation. In order to raise money for the legal expenses of the students prosecuted during the student protests of the time (the legal actions would be especially repressive after the passing of the Emergency Laws of 1968, known in German as “Notstandsgesetze“), the edition of his famous poster would be reprinted successively throughout the mobilizations of the extra-parliamentary left throughout 1968 and 1969, becoming a true generational emblem.

Finally the Student Federation would disintegrate in 1970, and some of its members (as would happen later with some members of the Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv) would join the RAF. One of its most relevant members was Ulrike Meinhof, journalist and pacifist militant, who would end up participating in the liberation of Andreas Baader and joining the guerrilla organization itself, becoming its ideological leader. Later, as is known, she would die by committing suicide in Stammheim prison in Stuttgart, according to the official version.

In this piece -in which Carrasco proposes a time frame that goes from the graphic campaign of the SDS to the unofficial execution of the RAF militants in Stammheim-, an original poster by Jürgen Holtfreter and Ulrich Bernhardt has been reproduced, respecting all the deterioration it has suffered over the last 54 years. On it, the engraving made on the methacrylate shows the list of maximum and minimum temperatures in degrees Celsius for the entire duration of the judicial process against Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe, the leaders of the first generation of the RAF.

During the 708 days that the trial lasted (from May 21, 1975 to April 28, 1977), the prisoners were in total isolation, so they only saw the outside through the particular windows of the building, remaining inside at all times. Even the courtroom itself was built inside the prison to avoid any escape or external contact, so the piece poses the paradox of the weather -to which the 1968 poster itself alludes- as an element totally alien to the prisoners.