I don’t think much training is needed to deliver the mail. Apparently it was big business in East Germany. Enough to invoke DDR’s favorite martyr Rosa Luxemburg in the cause. Little do these young apprentices know they will soon be merged and then privatized. Ms. Luxemburg would not approve. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
This is the only stamp I have seen from anywhere invoking the training of postal workers. They show multiple specialties and the involvement of various institutions. The East German Post had wider communication tasks including telegraphs and telexes. Made it seem like the future.
Todays stamp is issue A653, a 20 Pfennig stamp issued by East Germany on February 10th, 1981, your author’s twelfth birthday. It was a five stamp issue in various denominations. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 25 cents whether used or unused.
Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish Jew who was the daughter of a lumber merchant in then(1871) Russian occupied Poland. She joined hard left movements in Poland but then had a break with them. They supported Polish independence from Russia and Germany while Rosa thought the more important thing was that Germany and Russia become communist. She went into exile in Switzerland where she earned a Phd and involved herself with the Socialist Internationale. She spoke German, Polish, Hebrew and Russian. She desired to be German though it was not her heritage to be part of Berlin’s hard left scene. She had a sham marriage to a German man to obtain German citizenship. She joined the left wing German SPD party and taught Marxism. When World War I broke out, the SPD rallied to the flag and supported the war effort. Rosa was distraught by this decision. She helped form a group of former SPD members who opposed the war called the Spartacus League. Spartacus had lead a slave uprising in Roman times. The League supported dodging the draft, not following orders once in the army and labor disruptions to fight the war effort. This type of activity was of course against the law and Rosa was jailed. It also lead to the charge from the other side of politics that the war effort had been “stabbed in the back” by leftist Jews.
Rosa was released in an amnesty at the end of the war. Rosa’s former student, Fredrich Ebert was the new President of Germany. By now though Rosa had completely broke with the SPD and desired Germany to be a Soviet Republic. At the beginning of 1919 she started a putsch to destroy capitalism. The SPD opposed this violence and controlled a remnant of the German Army called the Freikorps. This deployed in the streets to fight the revolution. Rosa Luxemburg was taken in the street. After a short questioning Rosa Luxemburg was shot and her body dumped in the Landwehr Canal. She was now a martyr of the left.
Many years later, Rosa Luxemburg has been very controversial. The East Germans raised her high. Most of their leaders had also been part of the Internationale movement with long exiles outside Germany. On the other hand the official position of todays German government is that idolization of Rosa Luxemburg in a tradition of far left extremism. For example East German Post’s Rosa Luxemburg School of Engineering has lost her name and is now a telecommunication university. They have left standing the statue of Rosa Luxemburg visible on the stamp. Every year on the date of her death, the German left marches in a funeral parade for Rosa. The Freikorp officer that ordered the execution was taken into custody by the Soviets in the first days of the occupation of Berlin in 1945 and executed. He claimed to be following orders and had served jail time after the execution in 1919.
Well my drink is empty. Skirting Rosa, I will pour another drink to toast the young apprentices of German Post. I hope all the changes coming to the post were positive for you. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.