150 years in the past: The first German postcard

The postcard extensively believed to be the primary to ever be despatched on its means in Germany is a card with a small image of a soldier. August Schwartz, a bookseller within the northern German metropolis of Oldenburg, despatched it to a relative in Magdeburg on July 16, 1870, shortly earlier than the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.

However, it isn’t completely sure whether or not Schwartz’ card was actually the very first, in line with Veit Didczuneit, head of collections on the Berlin Museum for Communication. “No one has seen this postcard for a long time, it needs to be examined more closely,” he instructed Germany’s KNA information company.

Whichever got here first, 150 years in the past, Germans had been cautious of the brand new medium that might go on to be immensely fashionable all around the world. They apprehensive that “servants could read messages sent to their masters” and that the artwork of letter-writing would fall by the wayside, Didczuneit stated.

Greetings from….

Just a few years earlier, Heinrich von Stephan, a German postal reformer who based the Museum of Communication in Berlin, had been an outspoken advocate of the postcard. At the 1865 Austro-German Postal Conference, he proposed establishing the “Postblatt” (open put up sheet), however the thought was rejected.

It was the Austro-Hungarian postal authorities who first adopted the idea. The governmental “correspondence card” was launched there in 1869, marking the official starting of a brand new type of communication. 

Predecessor to messages and Instagram

In 1872, sending a postcard in Germany price simply half the postage of a regular letter, which contributed tremendously to its recognition. In giant cities, there have been a number of mail deliveries a day, that means {that a} greeting card would usually attain the recipient inside just a few hours. People might additionally ship a double card that included a pay as you go reply card, which is the way it grew to become a widespread format for fast greetings and conveying appointments, very like right this moment’s textual content messages. 

“In 1885, the picture postcard was officially approved in Germany; before that, the postal service had merely tolerated it for years,” Didczuneit stated. In the Nineties, the invention of chromolithography made multi-colored prints attainable.

Picture postcards had been notably fashionable between 1895 and 1914 and generated profitable income for the publishers. During World War I alone, about ten billion free discipline postcards had been despatched, together with many image postcards.

Postcards had been a quick vendor

According to Didczuneit, the illustrations on the playing cards had been initially all about “leaning about the world.” Picture postcards on the flip of the century coated fashionable sights and journey highlights, vacation and marriage ceremony greetings, varied matters of gossip, in addition to pleasure over the most recent technological developments or pure disasters.

Back in 1900, the postal service carried way more playing cards than it does right this moment — about one billion. In 1982 the variety of postcards despatched amounted to 877 million, however by 2018 tht quantity had dropped significantly, to 155 million. With present journey warnings and restraints in place throughout the coronavirus pandemic, the downward development is prone to proceed throughout the 2020 summer time trip interval.