Resistance arose within the Detmerode population when the city council erected a seating snake based on the designs of artist Hans Schönfeld in the heart of the district on the market square: "Although it is not poisonous, it poisons Detmerode's citizens' longed-for peaceful evening after work: the seating snake by Wolfsburg designer Hans Schönfeld", -__-0000-__- wrote the Wolfsburger Nachrichten in February 1975, just a few months after the sculpture was erected. The S-shaped seating sculpture made of plastic, consisting of a total of eight segments intended for resting and planting, as well as the U-shaped seating sculpture anchored next to it, were a thorn in the side of local residents (Fig. 1). The money invested should rather have gone to the sports clubs, according to one local opinion; the seating snake inviting people to linger caused noise nuisance for the residents of Detmeroder Markt, according to another. -__-0001-__- The cries of protest did not go unheard: Schönfeld's sculpture was dismantled, initially put into storage and finally re-installed at another location near the theater.

However, headwinds had been blowing long before the installation on the market square. In a letter to the city council, Wolfsburg architect Wolfgang Muthesius expressed concerns about the plastic seating snake, even if these were purely speculative. He speculated that the material could possibly turn an "ugly pale pink" after only a short time: "The constantly somewhat neglected impression of the Detmeroder Markt, which is due to the carelessness of the store owners and customers, but also to the necessary price cuts in the choice of materials (paving etc.) at the time, should be improved by the 'seat snake', but not made any worse", -__-0000-__- according to Muthesius' thoughts.
If an article in the Wolfsburger Allgemeine Zeitung is to be believed, it was precisely the intention of the city's stakeholders to "beautify" the market. -__-0001-__- Werner Hasselbring, the head of the city council, stated that the market exuded sterility and needed to be given a new look immediately. City planning officer Gerhard Kern, on the other hand, even found the market "frosty". The redesign plans themselves can be traced back to exhibits from a 1972 exhibition by the Schloßstraße 8 artists' collective. As the city no longer explicitly asked the group to submit designs ( --> Mauke, wall reliefs), the administration now linked its plans for the installation of art in public spaces to this exhibition and asked the artists to submit designs for eight explicitly named locations within the city and individual districts: -__-0002-__- Rudolf Mauke, Jochen Kramer, Olga Szaif-Pawlowa, Rolf Hartmann, Hans Schönfeld and Heiko Tappenbeck responded to the call and submitted a total of twelve models. -The culture committee quickly agreed to implement a large number of the models in the cityscape. Schönfeld's Sitzschlange, followed by Kramer's Spielplastik (--> Kramer, Spielplastik), was to make the start.-__-0004-__- Accordingly, a council resolution of April 25, 1974 stated:
"It is intended to erect the seating snake developed by the development group for form design and advertising - Interform-Design - Wolfsburg, Schloßstr. 8, consisting of 8 segments (seating and planting segments), to revitalize Detmeroder Markt. Such seating snakes have already been installed in several cities in Germany."-__-0005-__-
Two years earlier, Schönfeld had already informed the city that the unnamed "manufacturing company" would produce ten of them for the Hanseatic City of Hamburg. -__-0006-__- However, the seating sculpture, which had gained a nationwide reputation in this way, was not to fulfill its purpose of beautifying the dreary market in Detmerode for a long time. As early as the spring of the following year, Wolfsburg's city councillors and the culture committee discussed the damage and soiling of the seating snake.-__-0007-__- The artist himself apparently also heard this irritating news, as he wrote to the city planning department pleading for his sculpture to be removed:
"Nevertheless, I would like to reiterate my concerns regarding this placement. The concentration of young people on this square is just as strong as their need to measure their strengths and ideas against the existing objects. Certainly, an age-old need, but one that should not be provoked when other options areavailable." -__-0008-__- However, the artist's request to set up his seating snake elsewhere initially went unheard. Existing plans for its realization were rejected -__-0009-__- before Schönfeld's object finally had to give way completely and was initially "stored in a covered room" - the specific circumstances are not clear from the surviving file material. -__-0011-__- It was clear that there were no plans to put it back in its previous location, according to the city planning office.-__-0012-__- However, the seating snake did not remain in its exile for long: in the spring of 1977, the administration apparently found a more suitable location for Schönfeld's seating sculpture in the area in front of the side entrance to the theater:
"Since this area has a more exposed location in the course of the footpath connection from the theater to the Stadthalle, it can be assumed that the wanton damage will not be repeated with this proposed location."-__-0013-__-
Despite its re-installation on the slope of the Klieversberg, Schönfeld's seating snake disappeared from the public space after a brief guest appearance on the roof garden of the Alvar Aalto Kulturhaus at a time that cannot be reconstructed. The files reveal nothing about whether and where it was stored.