Footnote: Of Postcards and Serendipity

Some more information, thoughts, and photographs…

Prompted by some of you, dear readers, asking about the postcards I’m posting every now and then, well, here goes.

The collection of some 40,000 individual postcards from around 1900 until around 1980 was compiled over decades by my maternal grandfather. Born in 1922, he experienced the Interwar period as a teen, WW2 mainly in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front (from autumn 1942 through the end), and, after working several jobs in the 1950s, joined the Austrian Bundesheer in the early 1960s. He retired a Colonel with the anti-aircraft units around 1980, and he passed after a rather serious illness in early 1988. I was six years old by then.

What do I remember about my grandfather? Not a whole lot, most of which is this strange mixture of what I think I remember mixed with family lore and the occasional snippet of information I gather from my relatives. I’m trying to sort poetry from fiction (apologies to J.W. Goethe for that one).

One of the few photos I have—the author and his grandfather somewhere in Vienna, c. mid-1980s.

His ‘scrapbooks’ have survived, I do have a few photographs as well as a partial (fragmentary) narrative he put together after his retirement. What’s in there is about as banal as it is sanitised, to a certain extent (I think), and at some point in time I shall endeavour to visit the German Federal Archives and consult his service records. Until that moment in time, all that I can say is this: don’t ask me what he saw, experienced, and did during his years with the Wehrmacht, for I’m not sure.

He survived when so many others didn’t. The names and photographs of a few of them are ‘there’ still in his scrapbooks, and my grandfather wrote ‘missing’ (orig. vermißt) or crosses (†) below the photos of his comrades. Sometimes, there are photographs of burials or wooden crosses somewhere ‘in the east’. Let’s move on.

My (Grandfather’s) Postcard Collection

I came into possession of these postcards ‘by happenstance’. He died in 1988, and my grandmother in summer 2000. I recall clearing out her apartment, with the postcard collection being not really on my 18yo younger self’s mind. Some boxes fell down, we stuffed everything back in and put them into storage.

Fast-forward two decades, and my parents, who somehow kept the boxes and didn’t throw them away, asked if I would like to have them. So I said, hell, yes, I’d love to, without hesitation, without knowing what I’d get myself into, and with even fewer ideas what to do with them.

By now, my thoughts are ripening, and I’ve seen some (scholarly) literature—foremost Alison Rowley’s wonderful Open Letters: Russian Popular Culture and the Picture Postcard, 1880-1922 (U of Toronto Press, 2013)—talked to some people here and there, and met with the good people of the local postcard collectors’ association (yes, there’s one of these outfits ‘even’ in my neck of the woods). Come June, I’m going to outline a few thoughts at a conference in Italy, and by then, I’m sure that my thoughts will be a bit clearer about the way forward.

Some of the makeshift boxes my grandfather made five decades ago; the picture was taken last summer in Vienna as my parents prepared the collection for shipping across Europe.

I do think any (scholarly) avenue will include digitising a sizeable chunk of them and drawing up a digital inventory, preferably with enough information on both the picture side and, if used, also for the reverse (text) to enable quantitative analysis.

So far, I thought of a book about the ‘lost art of postcard writing’ with the somewhat clumsily arranged contents revolving around technical aspects (ex-post coloured chromatographs to ‘real photographs’ to cheap, mass-produced off-print specimen), the images and their canonical values, and, of course, something about buildings and sights that no longer exist. Moreover, many images survive that show ‘traditional’ costumes and street life, hence an anthropological-ethnographic angle appears possible, too.

This is how and where (in my office) these ten boxes of—according to customs declarations—800 kg worth of postcards are found.

Most of the postcards—some 80-90% I think—are of places in Austria, with the remainder from mainly the neighbouring countries. There’s a clear eclectic collector’s bias, which is—great, as I occasionally find postcards written by relatives between the late 1930s through the early 1980s. I do think any book will have to include a chapter about the collector, my relatives, and the odd position this puts me (the scholar) into in these regards.

We will see where this leads to, but one thing is certain: these postcards are quite a thing, and I’m gladly taking you along for the ride.