Welcome readers to todays offering from The Philatelist. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, arrange your wares and lets make some sales. We are having a trade fair, like we used to.
During the cold war period both Capitalist West Germany and Communist East Germany issued postage stamps. In general, the Western stamps were better than the Eastern. Today though is the exception. This East German stamp is bold, well printed and combines history with a view forward that few stamp issues anywhere pull off successfully.
The stamp today is issue SP252, a 12 Pfennig stamp issued by East Germany on September 2, 1947. The stamp features a view of the Leipzig Trade Fair circa 1497. It is part of a four stamp issue, two of which are semi postal. The issue is a celebration of the post war resumption of the trade fair. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents in its much more common mint condition.
As this issue of stamps celebrate, there have been trade fairs in the German city of Leipzig as far back as 1160 AD. The fairs over time became more often and German/Saxon leaders decreed that the fairs must be in Leipzig. Being one of the bigger cities in the east, the fairs became a gateway where traders from the east and west of Europe met. A good portion of this was Jewish merchants and a Moorish style Synagogue was build adjacent in heavily Lutheran Leipzig.
Naturally there were no trade fairs during World War II. Despite being originally captured by the American Army, Leipzig ended up in the Eastern section. The decision was taken to restart the trade fairs in 1946. In order to counter act the lure of the Marshall Plan in Western Europe. The Marshall plan handed out aid to Western European countries, both friend and former foe alike. Soviet leader Stalin started the Comecon organization to get Warsaw Pact nations to work more closely together economically. This included the former foe of East Germany. The trade shows in Leipzig became a big part of that as the Eastern nations could demonstrate their products to one another. It is a credit to their confidence in their products that Westerners were invited to participate.
Comecon outlasted Stalin and the Marshall Plan but it did not survive the fall of Communism in the early 1990s. The Leipzig trade shows however did survive and continue up to the present day.
Well my drink is empty so I will place my orders and perhaps find a hospitality suite to cement the relationships being built. It must have been a relief after so much war and radical governments to get back to the relative normalcy of the trade fairs. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.