Was Miss Anna happy - or just annoyed? In any case, there was someone out there in Karlsruhe who sincerely adored her: on that June 22, 1904, Anna was sent no fewer than four postcards by a unnamed admirer.
To see on the cards: Views of an elegant couple at different times of the day. Matching four love greetings in poem form, starting with "Good morning!", "Good day!", "Good evening!" and good night!". The most beautiful was the worshiper at the night greeting: "Good night and sweet dreams, hover around you in the dark room." And I ask me humbly: Dream a little of me too. "
If Anna had been a Berliner, her admirer might even have sent a love salute up to eleven times a day: So often at the turn of the century in the then capital of the Reich, the post office was delivered. The people arranged by postcard in the morning to the 15 o'clock tea or at noon to the diner, swore eternal fidelity or bitter revenge, condolences or congratulations to each other.
A few words, scrawled quickly on paper - and down into the mailbox with it: The postcard fulfilled the function that today WhatsApp, SMS and Co. have taken over to its heyday. A fast, informal, inexpensive form of communication. On its 150th birthday, the Berlin Museum of Communication congratulates the postcard with the exhibition "More Than Words". The 500 exhibits on display tell of the variety of a highly sensual medium - which met with fierce resistance at the beginning.
Austrian Sparfuchs gives the impetus
When the later General Postmaster Heinrich von Stephan at the 5th German Postal Conference 1865/66 proposed the introduction of an open "Postblattes" as a cheap alternative to the letter, the colleagues reacted allergic: Such, readable for everyone card they demonized as "indecent form of communication ", which not only violates the secrecy of correspondence and spoils the customs, but also leads - due to its lower price - to sinking revenues.
Less anxious than the Prussians were the neighbors in Austria-Hungary, where economist Emanuel Herrmann campaigned for the postcard to save expensive stationery, envelopes, ink and sealing wax. He also saw the new medium as a symbol of progressiveness and hoped that "Austria would once advance to the favored nations of the West," as Hermann wrote in a newspaper article in early 1869.
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150 years postcard: "indecent form of communication"The Austrian postal administration heard Herrmann, introduced the "correspondence card" on October 1, 1869 - and triggered an unexpected hype: in the last three months of the year alone, around three million postcards were sold in the Habsburg Empire, and other countries quickly followed suit. When Stephen became General Postal Director of the North German Confederation in 1870, he also introduced the card within his jurisdiction - on the first sale day alone, June 25, 1870, more than 45,000 copies were sold in Berlin.
Greetings from the sky
The small rectangle of paper was deeply democratic and hit the nerve of the time: Gone are the years in which only the educated wrote. The medium of postcard people used from all social layers - also because the postage since 1872 was only half as expensive as for a letter. In a world of increasing industrialization and mobility, with people moving massively to the cities, they kept in touch by postcard.
In addition, the medium benefited from the development of photography: The postcard quenched the image hunger of the Fin de Siècle, also spread thanks to the emerging mass tourism, it was rapidly. "What is the first, when Mr. and Mrs. Muller go to heaven? They ask for postcards", teased the poet Christian Morgenstern in 1907.
The British "Standard", in turn, wrote about the German postcard fever in 1899: "The traveling Teutone seems to regard it as his solemn duty to send a postcard from every station of his journey as if he were on a scavenger hunt. ...) is to find an inn where he takes turns drinking his beer and addressing postcards. "
Of the 2.7 billion letters sent in the German Empire in 1900, around one billion were postcards, of which 50 percent were postcards. Newly founded professional journals such as "The postcard collector" or the "International Postcards Revue" informed about the latest trends. And lovers organized themselves in associations such as the "World Association Cosmopolitan", founded in 1897, to which in 1912 at least 11,000 members from all over the world belonged.
"Commons Vulnerability of the Postcard Mania"
The postcard manufacturers were jubilant - the complainers went to the barricades. "Sugar tax on picture postcards!" demanded the Austrian writer Karl Kraus 1899 in an article. He complained about the "common danger of the postcard mania," sympathized with the "rushed postman, who had to climb four floors because of a 'greeting from Ischgl' in Vienna. And wrote: "I saw crashed tourists at the same time put on a postcard with the will."
During wartime, the postcard as a free sign of life to new popularity: Already in the Franco-Prussian War 1870/71 shipped millions of times, were in the First World War alone by German soldiers, according to estimates ten billion postage-free field postcards sent home.
After the war, the postcard passion ebbed away as the number of phone lines increased. Of the 5.7 million letters sent in Germany in 1931, the proportion of postcards was only 20 percent.
46 kilometers in 83 years
Nevertheless, the medium continued to live, whether as a holiday or Christmas greeting, for erotic edification or as Nazi propaganda. As a "mirror of cultural history," wrote Gerhard Kaufmann in his work to a postcard, the small cardboard conveyed values and desires, the political climate and fashion. "It offered art and what you thought it was," said Kaufmann, "for detergents and biscuits, fertilizers and war loans, for the circus and for Adolf Hitler."
Primary school students and senior citizens send postcards today. Everyone else quickly types in a message on their mobile phone, in lousy weather they put a colorful filter over the beach photo and press "Send". In 1982, the Federal Post Office carried 877 million postcards a year, and in 2017 just 195 million were sent.
After all: According to a recent survey by the digital association Bitkom more than every other tourist (55 percent) with a postcard or a letter from the holidays. That gives hope, after all, you can not pin a Whatsapp on the fridge.
Whether cheesy sunset, goggling seal or nude beach nostril on the back: Such a printed piece of paper makes the heart beat faster than a digital greeting - even if it comes from a dead man. In February 2009, Rosa Morre fished a postcard of her father from the mailbox, which had been traveling for 83 years.
The Belgian soldier Victor Morre had sent her in 1926 to his 46 kilometers away living family. "If you have not sent a shirt, then do it quickly," wrote the then 20-year-old; on the back was a photograph of bombed houses from the First World War. The card had slipped behind a cupboard in the post office, where it slumbered unnoticed for decades.
"Never before have I been so happy with a card," Morre said as she held the yellowed memorabilia in her hands.
