E There is hardly anything that triggers foreign shame as reliably as location marketing. The other day I had to pick someone up from the airport, where there were still all those “hub of the scorpions” banners hanging around that they had put up there for the band’s big anniversary last year.
I hummed Thees Ulmann’s “What will happen to Hannover when the Scorpions are no more” quietly so as not to squirm in embarrassment the whole time, but that didn’t really help either. Last week there was news that Lower Saxony was planning another image campaign and had budgeted ten million euros for it.
The Europe-wide tender is almost complete, this time without any fuss or resignations. A presentation of the results is imminent in the near future. Of course, there is only one conceivable reaction to this: So much money, you’d rather spend it on x.
And although the government spokesman emphasized several times that it was not clear whether the current slogan “Lower Saxony. Clear.” would also be used on this occasion. should be exchanged, that was deliberately left open in the tender, but of course the entire debate then focused on – of course – this very slogan.
Slogans that no one remembers
TV crews and radio interns immediately went out to do street surveys to document that no one could spontaneously think of anything remotely funny or original about this topic. I would be really grateful if AI could take over this soon. The result will be roughly the same.
The NDR immediately published a list of the slogans or claims of the other federal states, if they have any. If you want to test how catchy they are, try writing them down without looking. So I get zero out of 16 possible points.
The last country advertising slogan that stuck with me was “We can do everything. Except Standard German”. To my surprise, he has been deregistered since 2021. Since then, Baden-Württemberg has been advertising with “the country”, which I found so bad that I promptly dismissed it. It’s actually a completely logical progression. They can’t speak German or English.
In Lower Saxony you could of course say that we at least know standard German. From a scientific point of view, that’s not entirely truebut who listens to linguists? Certainly not advertising agencies.
The Lower Saxony identity problem
The fact that people immediately jumped on the slogan is of course due to the fact that the rest is even less tangible. Image? Lower Saxony? What the heck is that supposed to be? To do this you would first have to have a reasonably stable identity as Lower Saxony. But that’s where it fails.
Even in this infamous Lower Saxony song, with its ethnic-historical vocabulary, you define yourself primarily by who you fought against or who or what you definitely are not: Roman henchman, French brood, Franconian, unspoken also: Westphalian, igittipfui. “Stormproof and rooted to the earth,” well.
In Lower Saxony there are also so many different regional identities and local patriotisms that there is nothing left at all for the federal state – which is just an administrative brainchild from the post-war period.
In addition, half of the population moved here at some point in the last 80 years. We can do immigration. We have been taking in refugees since 1945 – and have been quite successful with it. But of course nobody wants to show off that at the moment.