You see little green men  everywhere when you go to cities in the former East Germany. Specifically, you see little green men in hats.

You see,  in cities that were part of East Germany, the Ampelmännchen, “traffic light little man”, wears a hat. Here are photos I took near the train station in Leipzig:

Green Ampelmännchen indicates “Walk”

Red Ampelmännchen indicates “Stop”

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, there was a movement to replace all East German things with West German things, and apparently this included retiring the little green man with the hat. However, people got nostalgic for the old days, and so at some point they stopped replacing the signs, and instead put them back. So today,  in cities like Potsdam and Leipzig which we visited in April, the pedestrian crossing signs have the little green guy with the hat.

I’ve been meaning to post about this since we came back from Leipzig and Potsdam.  I find the symbol kind of cute, and it is something that’s immediately striking as different when you visit former East German cities.

As it turns out, not only are the green guys with the hats cute — well, at least I think they are cute — they are very functional. Indeed, according to a recent study, people waiting at a stoplight to cross a street react more quickly to this symbol than they do to his typically personality-challenged bareheaded cousins (i.e. the normal pedestrian crossing stick-figure symbols).

So, there is a group that would like to get this guy installed all over Europe. I’m not sure how successful that campaign will be, but it is certainly the case that the little green man with the hat is popular as a souvenir symbol of East German. Name your favorite type of souvenir, and you can probably buy it with the little green man on it, as well as with his companion, the little red man. There are playing cards, hats, t-shirts, towels, clocks, calendars, pencils, erasers, plates, mugs, key chains … the list goes on and on.  There’s even a little pink girl figure who joins them on some of the things; that’s never used in the real signs, it’s just part of the tourist symbol set now.

And yes, Will, there are even chocolates in the shape of the little green men. Unlike with Godiva in Coventry, we don’t need to worry about the tourist potential of  the little green man being overlooked in Germany.