The HUMANIC Connection and the First Shitstorm

20.2.26 / Herwig G. Höller

In this blog, steirischer herbst research fellow and journalist Herwig G. Höller shares his discoveries in the festival archive. They frequently reveal surprising connections between steirischer herbst and the world of—local as well as international—politics.

On the morning of 13 September 1972, the phone rang at steirischer herbst. The caller introduced himself as “Engineer Leodolter”1 and launched into a tirade: “They should all be gassed,” he said, singling out composers Friedrich Cerha and György Ligeti and writer Alfred Kolleritsch, before making further threats. “He would do everything in his power to prevent steirischer herbst from succeeding and had enough allies to do so,” noted festival employee Ilse Maria Vollmost on a piece of paper preserved in the festival archives.

Half a century later, Vollmost vividly remembers this phone call—it sent her into a panic. “I ran to Paul Kaufmann [steirischer herbst’s executive secretary and a conservative member of the National Council] and wanted to go to the police to file a report,” she explained in an email in January 2026. Kaufmann, however, tried to calm her, arguing this would only draw more attention to the festival’s enemies.

“Off to steirischer herbst!”: An Offensive Poster

The trigger for this and further calls was the steirischer herbst ’72 poster, which had been presented two weeks earlier and brought the festival its first shitstorm. The poster and the brochure featured the slogan “Auf, zum steirischen herbst!” (“Off to steirischer herbst!”) alongside a photo of a portly test driver from the Puch car factory in Graz, seen from behind, who appeared to be pulling his pants down or up.

Ultrarightists, as well as respectable people with right-wing views, were outraged. One poster was pasted over with the slogan “Did he already … or does he still have to sh… on steirischer herbst?” The steirischer herbst Archive also contains countless letters, most of which take a stand against the poster. “I don’t consider the image to be modern, progressive, original, or funny, but simply very stupid and a serious gaffe,” wrote Hans-Georg Fuchs, a conservative member of the Styrian parliament and industrialist, threatening to resign from the Association of Friends of steirischer herbst.

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The design was the result of a competition run by artist collective pool (Horst Gerhard Haberl, Richard Kriesche, Rudolfine Kriesche, and Karl Neubacher), which—through trade unions—got in touch with recreational groups from five Styrian factories and asked them to create drafts. Although the winner was supposed to be chosen without any influence from the client, things, it seems, turned out differently: At the decisive meeting, Haberl and Neubacher demanded the “immediacy of advertising.”2 Initially, a pleasing design by the Stölzle glass factory from Köflach was preferred, but eventually, the choice fell on a more pithy work from the Puch factory. In addition to the winning photo, the latter’s art club had presented other proposals, including a more boring version and a potentially even more provocative design featuring a man showering, which, however, would have allowed less room for interpretation. The final choice proved very professional.

HUMANIC’s Influence on steirischer herbst

One reading of the campaign suggests itself in retrospect but wasn’t discussed in the media back then: Haberl was art director at the Graz shoe manufacturer and retailer HUMANIC and head of its “Department of the Future,” and Neubacher worked there as a designer. The two copied the advertising strategy that had caused a sensation for HUMANIC over to steirischer herbst. With contemporary, sometimes radically modernist experiments that had nothing to do with the advertised product, they had generated a great deal of buzz. Receiving comparable national and international attention using classic advertising methods would have been beyond steirischer herbst’s financial means.

Haberl’s curatorial activities at steirischer herbst in the early seventies can also be seen in the context of HUMANIC: The Association of Friends of steirischer herbst, headed by shoe company CEO Hans Mayer-Rieckh, appointed the HUMANIC art director to the festival’s program advisory board in 1971.

HUMANIC advertising materials from the Emil Gruber collection, steirischer herbst Archive, Foto: J. J. Kucek

HUMANIC advertising materials from the Emil Gruber collection, steirischer herbst Archive, Foto: J. J. Kucek

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HUMANIC had played a key role in the association, the festival’s very first legal entity, from the very beginning: When an illustrious group of entrepreneurs and bankers met in the office of Deputy Governor Hanns Koren on 6 March 1969 to found the association, HUMANIC—officially Heinisch & Mayer-Rieckh K.G.—was the only company represented by two people, half-brothers Hans Mayer-Rieckh (1910–1994) and Jörg Mayer-Heinisch (1921–2009).3 Mayer-Rieckh, a staunch market liberal and supporter of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), was elected president and remained in office until 1976. When Hanns Koren was replaced as festival president following a right-wing campaign against Wolfgang Bauer's play Gespenster (Ghosts), Mayer-Rieckh decided not to run for reelection. At the suggestion of Mayer-Heinisch, Hans-Georg Fuchs (1932–2020)—who had threatened to resign in 1972—became president of the association.

The Turning Point of 1969 and Synergies in the 1970s

The year 1969 was a turning point for both steirischer herbst and HUMANIC: It became clear that, unlike in its first edition in 1968, steirischer herbst would not remain a supplement to the Graz Summer Festival but replace it. This was also evident in the establishment of the Association of Friends of steirischer herbst.

HUMANIC, on the other hand, hired Haberl—an art history dropout who worked at Neue Galerie, Graz—as art director, laying the foundation for a drastic new corporate identity in effect for decades. At the time, this decision was seen as a response to growing Italian shoe imports. Haberl developed a radical advertising concept in which shoes no longer played a role. The first campaigns already offered a “philosophy,” with ruthlessly provocative content and an uncommercial, contemporary artistic element.4

In his ad experiments, Haberl worked with the same pool of artists and writers as steirischer herbst: Sculptor Roland Goeschl, who put his mark on HUMANIC’s 1970 campaign with red, yellow, and blue cubes, was also represented in the festival’s Austrian Art exhibition that year.

Meeting for the steirischer herbst ’72 poster competition, in the middle: Hans Gross (president of the Styrian Chamber of Labor), Hanns Koren, Ilse Maria Vollmost, and Horst Gerhard Haberl, photo: steirischer herbst Archive / Peter Philipp

Meeting for the steirischer herbst ’72 poster competition, photo: steirischer herbst Archive / Peter Philipp

Meeting for the steirischer herbst ’72 poster competition, photo: steirischer herbst Archive / Peter Philipp

Meeting for the steirischer herbst ’72 poster competition, photo: steirischer herbst Archive / Peter Philipp

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With the pool artist collective, the HUMANIC employee created exhibitions at steirischer herbst and also worked on its advertising. At times, there were concerns or opposition within the festival—for instance, in April 1972, even before the controversial poster was chosen. Festival founder Koren feared that the experiment with the workers might fail. Neue Galerie director Wilfried Skreiner even warned of an “anti-art project by Messrs. Haberl and Kriesche.”

However, the polemic correspondence between Skreiner and Haberl from this period also shows how HUMANIC supported Haberl’s activities at steirischer herbst by funding research trips, for example. There were also synergies, such as the video programs at steirischer herbst pool cocurated in the 1970s, including US Video Art (1975) and the 1st International Video Conference (1976). Without HUMANIC’s interest in the comparatively new medium of video, such projects would have been difficult to imagine.

Subsidies from the Chamber of Commerce and a Long-Term Relationship

HUMANIC also provided practical support in the 1970s: Since steirischer herbst initially wasn’t a legal entity and couldn’t hire anyone, since this would have been too complicated later on, and not all permanent staff could be employed by the province of Styria or the city of Graz, HUMANIC occasionally took on this function in return for reimbursement of costs. The cash books from the early days also show repeated donations from HUMANIC and—to an even greater extent—subsidies from the Styrian Chamber of Commerce, which Mayer-Rieckh headed between 1969 and 1980.

Through Haberl, HUMANIC was linked to steirischer herbst even much later. After working full-time for the shoe company between 1971 and 1984 and curating parts of the festival, he became its director in 1989, a position he held until 1995.

Correspondence in the archives shows that artists continued to associate Haberl, who still had good connections to his former employer, with HUMANIC during his tenure as director. For example, after the Viennese performance artist Christian Ide Hintze sent Haberl work samples in March 1993, the director replied somewhat belatedly in February 1994: “After consulting the HUMANIC company, we unfortunately do not see any possibility of using your work for a HUMANIC commercial.”

1

There is no further information about this person in the festival archives; they may have given a false name.

2

See Pfirsich 6 (October 1972).

3

Mayer-Rieckh and Mayer-Heinisch were sons of Felix Alexander Mayer (1875–1942) from his first and second marriages, respectively. Mayer, who came from Vienna, played a key role in expanding the former D. H. Pollak shoe factory in Idlhofgasse, which his father-in-law, Carl Rieckh, had taken over in 1904. After the Gestapo put pressure on him, the businessman, who was of Jewish descent, committed suicide in 1942. The shoe factory remained in the family’s possession through transfers to “Aryan” relatives and unspecified support from the Styrian Gauhauptmann, SS officer Armin Dadieu. Hans Mayer-Rieckh survived the war in the Wehrmacht—in a unit commanded by Franz Wegart, who later became a high-ranking Styrian ÖVP politician. (Renate Gross, “Hans Mayer-Rieckh—ein Mythos?” dissertation (University of Vienna, 2017); Maximillian Brunner, “Armin Dadieu: Versuch der Biographie eines Nationalsozialisten,” master’s thesis (University of Graz, 2017))

4

Wolfgang Seidler, “Versuch einer Darstellung der Begriff Image und Imagewerbung: Kritische Beurteilung der Werbekonzeption HUMANIC 1970,” diploma thesis (University of Vienna), 78.