Welcome readers to todays offering from The Philatelist. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take the first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. We have an interesting story of a German author whose reputation shot up to the stars when Germany found itself with superfluous towers.
Today stamp is recognizable as a West German stamp from the 1980s. Germany did the opposite of many western countries in doing stamps with current political leaders but very few of past leaders. This was true even before the second world war. What Germany always did was issue many stamps of leaders in various fields from previous periods. This would often be done on the anniversary of a birth. I am very fond of this practice as it allows the stamp collector to learn about those to whom there was no previous exposure.
The stamp today is issue A493, a 50 pfennig stamp issued by West Germany on August 13, 1981 to honor the 150th anniversary of the birth of the writer Wilhelm Raabe. The Scott catalog list the value as 50 cents cancelled. Interestingly, the Scott catalog mistakenly lists Mr. Raabe as a poet. He was instead a writer and secondarily a painter.
Mr. Raabe started writing at a fairly young age while he was employed as an apprentice in a bookshop. He quickly tired of the shopkeeper’s life and with the success of his early works he was able to devote himself full time to writing and advanced academics. His early works were funny insights into the life of the German bourgeois.
There were three distinct periods in Mr. Raabe’s writing. There was the early period described above. There was then a middle period where the work seemed to come under the influence of philosophical pessimism. This was being advanced at the time by the German philosopher Shopenhaurer. Philosophical pessimism puts forth that there really is no prospect of advancement in the human condition and that any striving was just the human will being dominant in the pursuit of humans baser needs. The last period in Mr. Raabe’s writing saw a more mature form of his humor return.
I identified a lot with the idea of three periods to a persons work. An early creative phase where a lot of ones best work is done. The optimism of youth can be such a formidable force. Then after time passes and perhaps the world has handed you a few hard knocks, a pessimism creeps in that will change the product being produced. Then at last a final phase where a lite touch returns and a more worldly but less serious tone emerges.
There is another interesting thing about Mr. Raabe. A 70 foot tower was named for him near Blankenburg, Germany in 1952, 42 years after his death. That may not be surprising as it was the area that Mr. Raabe lived. What makes it more interesting is that the tower was originally built in 1896 and was one of a series of towers built to honor various German Kaisers. They were built as a response to towers previously built to honor Otto von Bismarck. There was a perception that Bismarck was becoming something of a cult like figure to some. It would have been natural for the Kaiser to have thought that the people’s hearts belonged with him. To those people the sudden great number of competing towers must have been very strange.
Thus the renaming of the tower in 1952 for Mr. Raabe was understandable. By then few of the towers survived. This one still does.
Well, my drink is empty and so it is time to open up the conversation in the below comment section. Have any of our readers read Mr. Raabe’s books or even climbed his tower? Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.