Russian and German “Great War” Picture Postcards

ABSTRACT

The humble postcard became a medium for a flourishing visual culture during World War I. The range of styles and messages is especially impressive in the Russian cards, often using art by major artists but also by talented anonymous ones. The German Feldpost serves as a contrasting counterpoint. In both cultures, the most popular images were repurposed in unexpected ways.

KEYWORDS:

• Fritz Erler
• Germany
• Hoover Institution Archives
• Leonid Pasternak
• postcards
• Propaganda
• Russia
• Russian art
• World War I

Notes

^1. I would like to thank Peter Paret, formerly of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, for his encouragement of my interest in World War I postcards and their relationship to political poster art.

^2. A quick look at typical reference books indicates that the Russian postcard industry has been less well understood in the West than the German one. The knowledgeable John Lafflin wrote in World War I in Postcards: “If Russians had postcards during the Great War, they did not reach the West” (p. 175). Like so many of the other Hoover visual and fine art collections, the 5,000 Russian postcards cards in the Hoover Institution Archives were simply not well known. Richard Hartmann asserted in his fascinating Picture Postcard Encyclopedia of Russia that Russian war cards did not attain “the unlimited yet refined degree of hate and contempt that characterized the German, French and Austro-Hungarian cards of these years.” Many examples from the Hoover Institution’s set of Russian cards are on a par with the nationalistic hatred found in the propaganda of other countries. Alison Rowley has addressed this gap in the English language literature with her richly detailed book Open Letters: Russian Popular Culture and the Picture Postcard, 1880–1922 (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2013).

^3. A. A. Levenson, Tovarishchestvo skoropechatni A. A. Levenson: lstoricheskii ocherk i opisanie masterskikh 1881–1903 (Moscow, Russia: Levenson, 1903). An uncataloged copy of this book is located in the art vault collections of the Hoover Institution Library.

^4. For an analysis of this oddly enduring symbol see Peter Paret Persuasive Images: Posters of War and Revolution from the Hoover Institution Archives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 44 and pp. 108–109.

^5. Stephen White, The Bolshevik Poster (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988) 14–15. The Hoover Institution has examples of the postcard, with and without the red blood, in the “World War I Pictorial” collection. The original poster (RU/SU 1066) and the Bolshevik version (RU/SU) 2284 are in the “Poster Collection.”