Ernst Bettler is a fictional

Swiss Swiss may refer to: * the adjectival form of Switzerland * Swiss people Places * Swiss, Missouri * Swiss, North Carolina *Swiss, West Virginia * Swiss, Wisconsin Other uses *Swiss-system tournament, in various games and sports *Swiss Internation ...

graphic designer A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography, or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, ...

. He was invented by Christopher Wilson in a 2000

hoax A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into pu ...

article published in the second issue of '' Dot Dot Dot'', a magazine of visual culture. According to the article, Bettler was asked in the 1950s to design advertisement

poster A poster is a large sheet that is placed either on a public space to promote something or on a wall as decoration. Typically, posters include both typography, textual and graphic elements, although a poster may be either wholly graphical or w ...

s for ''Pfäfferli+Huber'' (P+H), a Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer. The article states that Bettler knew of the company's involvement in

Nazi Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...

concentration camp Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply ...

experiments and decided to accept the commission with the intention of damaging P+H. The four posters he created, Wilson's article recounts, were exemplary works of

International Typographic Style The International Typographic Style, also known as the Swiss Style, is a graphic design style that emerged in Russia, the Netherlands, and Germany in the 1920s and was further developed by designers in Switzerland during the 1950s. The Internatio ...

design, advertising P+H drugs such as "Contrazipan". However, according to the article, the posters featured abstract compositions that could be read as

capital letters Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...

– spelling out "N - A - Z - I" when displayed in sequence. Wilson's article states that the public outcry that followed the public display of the posters ruined P+H in a matter of weeks. Even though it was highly detailed and featured many photographs and illustrations, the article was a complete fabrication. Ernst Bettler, Pfäfferli+Huber and its drugs do not exist, and neither do the Swiss towns "Sumisdorf" and "Burgwald" that feature in the article – their names are presumably based on the real Swiss towns of

Sumiswald Sumiswald is a municipality in the district of the Emmental administrative district in the canton of Bern, Switzerland. It is mostly known for being the manufacturing location of the Swiss railway clock. History Sumiswald is first mentione ...

and Burgdorf. Nonetheless, the story was well received in graphic design circles. Among others, the September/October 2001 "Graphic Anarchy" issue of ''

Adbusters The Adbusters Media Foundation is a Canadian-based Nonprofit organization, not-for-profit, Environmentalism, pro-environment organization founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia. Adbusters describes itself ...

'' magazine hailed Bettler's work as "one of the greatest design interventions on record", and the 2002 graphic design textbook ''Problem Solved'' by Michael Johnson covers Bettler as one of the "founding fathers of the ' culture-jamming' form of protest". Wilson's article was first revealed to be false in a 2002 entry in the

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

Lines and Splines by Andy Crewdson. The Bettler hoax and its reception was subsequently covered by

Rick Poynor Rick Poynor is a British writer on design, graphic design, typography, and visual culture. Career He began as a general visual arts journalist, working on ''Blueprint'' magazine in London. After founding Eye (magazine), ''Eye'' magazine, which he ...

in an article in the February 2003 issue of ''

Eye Eyes are organs of the visual system. They provide living organisms with vision, the ability to receive and process visual detail, as well as enabling several photo response functions that are independent of vision. Eyes detect light and conv ...

'' magazine, as well as by other blogs.

References

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Bettler, Ernst Fiction set in the 1950s 2000 hoaxes Culture jamming Fictional artists Literary characters introduced in 2000 Fictional Swiss people Swiss graphic designers Hoaxes in the United States Nazism in fiction Nonexistent people used in hoaxes