Mehdorn’s legacy

On Monday, Hartmut Mehdorn stepped down as head of German train company Deutsche Bahn amidst a row about the company spying and deleting trade unionists’ emails.

Before his time at DB, Mehdorn had been CEO of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, the world’s leading maker of printing machines. The most prominent reminders of his time here are obviously the Print Mecia Academy with the three-legged (yes, that is three-legged) statue called “s-printing horse“.  They say that at 13 m,  it’s the world’s biggest horse sculpture, designed by Jürgen Goertz. He must be good mates with Mehdorn. When DB opened the new Berlin main station (another huge amount of air enclosed by steel and glass), Goertz put up a very similar statue there (“rolling horse”). Much to the ridicule of the arts pages  of national dailies as well as the national artists union, by the way.