Democracy is consensus. And it is important to reconcile so many individual opinions! For example with the euro banknotes, for the current design of which Reinhold Gerstetter from Berlin is jointly responsible. Gerstetter actually had optically something completely different in mind, but that still had to be discussed in various committees.
“Even fitting the face of Europa, the mythological figure from which the continent takes its name, wasn’t easy,” remembers Gerstetter, now 77 years old. Many nationalities with different political orientations at numerous management levels took part in the discussion – in the end, in the current EU banknote series, bridges and arches were used again, which in reality do not exist at all. The symbolic beats the concrete.
But the face of Europa as a hologram was important to Gerstetter. Because it’s about concrete values, in such a community of values - and after all, Europe is based on antiquity. “I can still hear the voices saying: This is too much Greece for us.”
A decision on a new banknote design is expected to be made in 2026. Until the end of August, the ECB will have online votes on whether rivers, birds, buildings or people should be on paper money. Whereby the question is always how concrete all this can become. Gerstetter, who already designed the last D-Mark series, all sorts of stamps as well as Spanish and Chinese paper money, brought European artists such as Da Vinci, Picasso or Rubens into play for the optics years ago, but did not succeed in doing so.
Europe has so much to offer that you don’t have to depict anything fictitious, says the designer
In fact, the question is: Who or what actually stands for Europe? Can any EU citizen make friends with this or that person’s origin, gender and biography? And how do you fit ideas from so many member states onto just six banknotes? Is it the same with the coins? “They’re harder to fake,” says Gerstetter. Paper money must be uniform.
“In my opinion, in the end, the designer alone should decide what to put on it,” Gerstetter advises, age-wise, but that’s not very democratic either. He has not yet completed the online survey. He’s retired now. But he probably wouldn’t enjoy it much, because it suggested, for example, depicting a sandy beach to illustrate democracy (“The beach only exists thanks to the many grains of sand,” it says).
Let’s see if Europa, meaning Zeus’ lover again, makes it into the hologram again. Or whether it will be replaced by the “image of a hand holding the scales of Lady Justice” (also wording from the ECB survey). After all: You can also vote for specific “monuments, works of art from literature, music or science and their authors”. This could mean the Eiffel Tower. Or Rolf Zuckowski. For Gerstetter it is clear: “We have so many outstanding European things – you can’t show something fictitious again!”