He remembers, ‘I wanted to be a pioneer at any price, because everything else seemed to be too boring.’ What he wanted to do was run his own 156 number, to use this very new technology to challenge the hypocrisy of the media and to pointedly shock the culture of the dull, lifeless and extraordinarily wealthy city of Zürich. He loved The Sex Pistols, the British band who in 1977 had reached Number One in Britain in the week of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and subsequently shocked the nation with their angry lyrics and by swearing on national television. Perhaps Herbert’s scam could do the same. Zürich, after all, had a history of bizarre events. Dada, the art movement that first shocked polite society by performing nonsense poetry, making collages and championing tomfoolery in the face of the horrors of the First World War, had begun here, and went on to influence almost every aspect of conceptual art in the twentieth century.
Herbert also liked the 156 idea because it made him feel like a grown-up. ‘We wanted our own company, our stickers, our logo, our publicity,’ he recalls. The 156 line might even make some money, and he particularly liked the fact that this partly entrepreneurial venture would irritate the pious protestors, the po-faced squatters and the bickering politically correct alumni of his old school, all of whom were critical of any sort of commerce.
Herbert registered a phone line and set about gathering a team to execute the project. He called on his old friend Juri to handle the technology and set up the equipment. Juri was an apprentice electrician, but hated the dull monotony of a professional life that demanded so little of his skills. He had spent his younger years locked in front of computers, trying to break into computer networks as part of the tiny and highly specialised underground world of phone-phreakers and hackers. As he would later prove, he was extremely talented when armed with a computer, a modem and a few bits of elegantly written code. In person he was shy and rather wordless, and computer technology provided him with a way of communicating with the world. At high school, where Herbert met him, Juri shoplifted-to-order computer accessories for his classmates and ploughed the profits back into his enormous phonebills. He was tall and clumsy, with an unmemorable face; his fearlessness was the key to his successful career as a hacker.
Another friend whom Herbert contacted for help was Alberto. Herbert and Alberto’s families had known each other for ever; by 1992, Alberto, two years older than Herbert, was already committed to a career as a student of architecture at the Zürich Technical University. By contrast to the scruffy punks and slackers squatting the Wohlgrot, he was always neat, his vivid dark eyes framed by delicate black-rimmed glasses. Herbert and his friends had nicknamed him Master Proper, the name of a cleaning product. More distant and ultimately more calculating than his friends, Alberto would in the years to come bring a cold, intellectual grounding, the brains to their sloganeering rebellion.
Thomas was the third of Herbert’s friends to be recruited. Tall, with a rectangular-shaped head, he posed as a violent bruiser and loved what he considered to be the glamorous chic of motorbikes and guns. He would happily spend hours cooking barbecues, drinking beer and watching Formula One. However, this muscled exterior concealed a clever soul; Thomas was a gifted storyteller, and laced his deft observations with a dry and inscrutable humour.
The name that Herbert, Juri, Alberto and Thomas chose for their scam was HIRN-lein, meaning ‘small brain’ but in Swiss-German sounding just like ‘brain line’.
Soon the posters they had painted were pasted all over Zürich. They screamed ‘BLOODBATH’ in large print, alongside an assurance to readers that the words had been splattered with real pigs’ blood. Herbert ascribed the action to a new organisation called Verein der Freunde Monopolistischer Märkte (VFMM) – The Association of the Friends of Monopolistic Markets – a joke at the expense of the anti-capitalist squatters.
Anyone who responded to the gruesome poster and phoned HIRN-lein’s l½-franc-a-minute line (about 50 pence Sterling, or 90 American cents) was greeted by machine-gun fire and the screams of a hysterical woman. This was followed by the moralising and portentous voice of a man: ‘Dear listener, is this what you want to listen to? Is a bloodbath a reason to call us? It is sad if not tragic that you too are part of this pitiable crowd who feels attracted by a bloodbath, a massacre, even misery and death of fellow human beings.’ In the background, symphonic film-music reached a crescendo. The narrator continued in an imploring tone: ‘You have dialled this number; reflect on it, be honest with yourself. Is it worth throwing life away to obscene lust?’ The tape ended with HIRN-lein’s slogan, ‘The Modesty of Truth’.
Hardly anyone but their friends called, and the story was not picked up by the press. Only Marc Ziegler, a prosecutor known as ‘the hunter of the 156 numbers’ for his determined attempt to shut down the more pornographic lines, seemed to notice HIRN-lein at all. When interviewed by a reporter on a local radio station about the 156 phenomenon, he said that someone should take the HIRN-lein boys by the ear and give them a good talking-to.
Still they remained desperate for a reaction to their work, and thus recorded further tasteless stories and produced yet more shocking posters. It was a poster bearing the slogan ‘Somehow we find it completely perverted to fuck in front of a dead body’ that provoked a complaint to another Zürich prosecutor, Lino Esseiva. He then launched a pornography investigation against Alberto, as registrant of the phone number – the boys had discovered that it was illegal for Herbert, as a minor, to have the phone line registered in his name, so had cautiously transferred it into Alberto’s, the only one of the group who was over twenty years old. Alberto was summoned to Esseiva’s office and closely questioned about his intentions; his response was to cleverly explain that HIRN-lein was a media-and-art experiment, rather than a porn line. This seemed to satisfy Lino Esseiva, who accepted that the group’s actions weren’t criminal – even if he thought they were disgusting.
The boys were happy that their oeuvre finally had been noticed. They cheered themselves on with the thought, ‘The more people hate us, the better.’ To up the ante, Herbert asked his friend Nico Wieland to write a letter to Tages-Anzeiger, Switzerland’s most popular broadsheet newspaper. After outlining his puritan disdain of the antics of HIRN-lein, Nico signed off: ‘I rely on the tiny remains of intelligence that are left in our society to fight this and other perversions.’ The letter was published and had the desired effect: the much dreamed-of journalists started calling.
To the boys’ delight, the journalists mostly wrote sanctimonious condemnations. ‘We are the Saddam Husseins of the 156 lines,’ Herbert gloated in response to press questions. When a journalist from Switzerland’s biggest tabloid newspaper called, they told her that they were students who believed in the imminent arrival of extra-terrestrials and wanted to use the line to finance the building of a landing strip in Ethiopia. The credulous journalist agreed to meet them, and under the expert supervision of architecture student Alberto they spent the whole night drawing plans and building a model. The following Sunday the tabloid ran the headline ‘Hallo Ufo, bitte landen!’ (‘Hello UFO, please land!’) accompanied by a picture: Thomas, in jacket and tie, with a map of Africa; Alberto, smiling under his spectacles, with his model of the landing strip; and Herbert, in a baseball cap, holding a poster bearing their 156 number, looking like a geeky high-school student.
Herbert also used his contacts to persuade Swiss National Television to carry a report on their youth show. He dictated his terms. Instead of giving interviews, Alberto pretended to be a phone-line addict; Juri and Thomas, in suits and ties, played the HIRN-lein entrepreneurs; and Herbert acted as the group’s chief ideologist.
The project was a triumph in media manipulation, but after a couple of months Herbert had to wind it down – for all the publicity, it hadn’t made any money.
By the spring of 1993, Herbert again felt under pressure to make his way in the world and find something new to do. More than anything, he hated the idea of getting a job, of joining the plodding