German Postcards Ca. 1900 - 1917

Today I got three albums with old postcards. Two of them with postcards from the time before WW1 and one album with "Kriegserinnerungen" - "war memories" from WW1.

I'd like to show you some of them here

The albums themselves:
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The first postcard:
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The picture shows a Marine "Show" (Marine Schauspiele) with the motto "Unsere Zukunft liegt auf dem Wasser" - "Our future lies on the water". The card was printed 1902 - the time when it was fashion for small children to wear marine uniforms (Have some photos of that somewhere too...)

Thank you, Drudenfus. I love looking at old postcards.
Please show us more of them.

I will post some more later. It's just too dark now, to take recognizable pictures... Also I want to try reading the postcards, so I can tell you more about it than just showing the picture. As you probably all know, reading old handwriting isn't always that easy

Just one question, are you more interested in the military cards, or the "normal" ones?

bring on the military ones

If you were asking me in reply to my post, the "normal" ones especially
showing views of towns and other locations... with identification as to
where.

Ok, here's one "normal" then:



This postcard shows the Heidelberg castle, the Neckar (river) and parts of the old town. The card was cancelled in 1899 and I find it surprising, that this part of Heidelberg looks nearly identical up to today.

In the upper left corner you can see a verse of the Badnerlied (National Anthem of Baden). It reads:

"Alt-Heidelberg, du feine,
du Stadt an Ehren reich,
am Neckar und am Rheine,
kein' and're kommt dir gleich."

which roughly translates to:

"Old Heidelberg, you noble city,
rich in honors
On the banks of the Neckar and Rhein,
you are without equal."

Underneath the text are two Verbindungsstudenten ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studentenverbindung ).
Here is a photo of Verbindungsstudenten from Berlin.

The card was sent from Heidelberg to Babstadt near Bad Rappenau (about 50km distance) and arrived there one day later.

Sadly I can't really read the handwriting, just a few words, and to me it seems that it somehow rhymes.

I tried to remove some of the cards from the album pages to take pictures of their backsides. But I fear the pages might rip apart, because the paper is very fragile due to it's age
So I won't try that again and instead show you the pictures only. I hope you don't mind that much.

Anyway, here you can see an interesting card from Frankfurt am Main (Hesse).



The card shows the "Kaiser-Automaten-Restaurant-Gesellschaft"... "Kaiser automaton-restaurant-company". The "Kaiser" company is still in business, located in Leipzig. Although I don't know if it actually is the same company or if it just has the same name - but they build automatons
Now what a "automaton-restaurant" seems to be is a restaurant, where everything is "automated" (to a level possible back then).
On the right picture you can see the sentence "Bediene selbst" written on the ceiling, which translates to "serve yourself".
On the right there seem to be a row of food dispensers, on the left you can get your "Dunkles Bier" - "dark beer".
That's something you don't see every day and I think it is very interesting to know, what technical advances were made bach then.

I also think it is rather odd, that a card from Frankfurt am Main was printed by a company in Köln - Cologne. Most of the cards I have from around that time were printed near the location they show.

The Kaiser-Automaten-Restaurant does look a bit more elegant than a bunch of snack machines near a lunch room, today!

Thanks for posting pictures of these cards and describing them.
They are very interesting!

Looks like you have a gold mine of postcards in those albums!

These albums surely are a goldmine! What's best about them: they didn't cost me a single Cent!
I'll be off to work in a few minutes, when I'm back my camera will be recharged, so I can take more pictures

Drudenfus, great looking postcards. The albums may seem a plus and yes it is nice to get the extra history with the album collection. But I would seriously think about removing the postcards from such albums even if damage would occur to the paper. The paper is fragile not only because of age but high acid content of paper making process back then. Darned if you do darned if you don't. Hard decision to save collection as a whole or to make sure the postcard is saved.

Regarding acid paper, seems I saw something a while ago, could have been from
Subway Stamps, that you could spray onto your collection to neutralize the
acid content of the paper. Wonder if you might have something like that in
Germany.

Wonderful postcards Drudenfus

Thank you for sharing them and their history with us.

Dianne

Beautiful collection! The 'album' covers look like they're hand painted. You have a real find there.

Have to check on that "acid-thing"
I would hate to see the cards being destroyed just because I stored them badly, on the other hand they already survived over 100 years in these albums without any serious damage. Definitely a hard decision

Now as I promised to show some of the military cards as well, here is one of them.


The person who sent this must be the one on the far right, because he was a member of an infantry regiment. Although I'm not quite sure he really is this person. I have other pictures of him, and it's hard to tell.
I find it very interesting to see how the Asians on that photo look like. Their clothes and everything look very "historical", but you have to remember that this photo is not that old, compared to world history. Another "proof" of how fast things have changed during the last 100 years.