What do you do if your clothing brand, ever so slightly tweaked to appeal to neonazis though you swear that’s not your intent, is parodied? You appeal to the decadent weakling courts of course to stop it:
Storch Heinar has been around since the winter of 2008, and is the brainchild of a left-leaning youth group called Endstation Rechts — which translates as “last stop for the right wing” — set up to combat right-wing extremism in the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony. As members of the groups discussed the opening of a “Nazi shop” selling, among other things, Thor Steinar in the middle of Rostock over a bottle or two of wine one night, they decided to respond by starting their own clothing label. And so the tale of the unhappy stork was born. “We were not drunk though,” Mathias Brodkorb, a Social Democrat and member of the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state parliament, one of the people behind Storch Heinar, told the daily Die Tageszeitung.
Storch Heinar’s popularity has increased over time, no doubt due partially to increased local media coverage of the brand — the range of goods available via their website is now large enough to include baby bibs and Frisbees and the brand has around 4,000 fans on Facebook. The label has sold “more than we thought it would,” Brodkorb told news weekly Focus. The profits fund the work of Endstation Rechts. Storch Heinar is only a small, and relatively uncomplicated, part of their work, Brodkorb, 33, who studied philosophy and classics, explained to Die Tageszeitung: “We are all fixated on neo-Nazis and often we overlook more subtle opportunities for people to be inhumane and right wing extremist.”
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Unsurprisingly, Mediatex GmbH, do not like any of this. The owners of Thor Steinar are known for their litigiousness and, as one local commentator put it: “Right wing extremism and humor go together like combat boots and Birkenstock sandals.”
Brodkorb told local media that the day after Storch Heinar was founded, the company that owns Thor Steinar tried to copyright the avian name. They were rejected. Mediatex then filed a complaint against Brodkorb, saying that Storch Heinar was injuring and “disparaging Thor Steinar.” The case went to court on Wednesday in Nuremberg. The small group behind Storch Heinar has been raising funds to fight the case — they even have a new T-shirt for sale that boasts the garment’s owner is part of the rescue team for the beleaguered bird.
Germans do have a sense of humour, but those who hanker back to the good old days of the Third Reich? Not so much.