What do you think of this fact?
A traffic signal that people campaign for? Sounds absurd, but it happened. When the East German “Ampelmännchen”, the little traffic light man, was about to disappear after reunification, citizens from East and West founded a “Committee to Save the Traffic Light Men”, and they won.
A psychologist draws a man with a hat
The Ampelmännchen wasn’t invented by a designer but by a traffic psychologist. According to German History in Documents and Images, Karl Peglau was asked by East Germany’s transport ministry in 1961 to design signals for pedestrian lights. According to the DDR Museum in Berlin, he presented his first design on October 13, 1961.
The idea: colour alone isn’t enough. A figure with a clear shape would make pedestrians more aware, especially children, and help prevent accidents.
The strange part: Peglau was worried about the hat. According to the DDR Museum, he feared it could be seen as a “bourgeois-capitalist symbol”. The design got through anyway. In 1969 the traffic light men lit up first in East Berlin, later across all of East Germany.
After 1990: get rid of it?
After reunification, the eastern signals were supposed to be swapped for West German versions. Designer Markus Heckhausen collected discarded traffic light men and turned them into lamps. That got a lot of attention, and the rescue committee grew out of it.
In 1997 it succeeded: the Ampelmännchen was allowed to stay and is even preferred for new traffic lights in the eastern German states. That same year, Heckhausen founded the company AMPELMANN, which turned the figure into a whole range of merchandise.
In the 1980s, the traffic light men even had their own cartoon episodes, shown on East German TV as part of the children’s program “Unser Sandmännchen”.
As if 1997 hadn’t brought enough traffic light news, the DDR Museum says a traffic light woman was added that year too, drawn by Hans-Jürgen Ellenberger.
So a little man with a hat managed something that many bigger things from East Germany didn’t: he stayed.