Tag: Germany stamp

When Bavaria was a separate German Kingdom, much work was done transforming Munich into an important cultural center. This legacy meant there was still a lot to show off when it was Germany’s time again to shine at the Olympics. We know the 1972 Olympics didn’t come off the way West Germany hoped, but this stamp lets us go back to the runup when people were excited that it might. 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 semi postal issue, the surcharge went to Olympic promotion, shows off some of the architecture of Munich. In this case the Residenz Palace. This housed the Bavarian Royal House of Wittelsbach when in Munich. The castle was started in 1385 as a sanction against the City of Munich after an uprising against King Stephen III. The castle was much expanded over the years and is today the largest urban palace in Germany. The facade shown on the stamp is the Konigsbau, which was added by King Ludwig I in 1835. The Wittelsbachs are of course no longer in residence. I did a stamp of the last Bavarian Kings here, https://the-philatelist.com/2018/11/14/bavaria-1900-with-king-otto-too-crazy-to-rule-the-prince-regent-peacefully-eases-into-germany/     . As a result when war damage was repaired, it was done in a much simpler style. The current Wittelsbach pretenders still reside in the separate Nymphenburg  Palace, which sounds like a fun place to live, but not for locked up Otto.

Todays stamp is issue SP299, a 10 +5 Pfennig stamp issued by West Germany on June 5th, 1970. It was a four stamp issue in various denominations. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 35 cents used.

Munich was awarded the 1972 Olympic Summer Games over bids from Madrid, Montreal, and Detroit. The slogan for the Olympics was the “Cheerful Games”. They went all out on new Olympic venues and the female hostesses dressed in traditional Beer Garden atire. For the first time there was an official mascot for an Olympics, a dachshund plushtoy named Waldi. The course of the marathon was laid out in the shape of a dachshund. Is it just me or does all of this sound a little out of Germany’s comfort zone. Well maybe Bavaria is a little different.

God did not grant Germany a cheerful Olympics. Israeli athletes were attacked and held during the second week of the games by Palestinians. There was a shoot out eventually at a military airport and 11 athletes, a German police Sargant, and all but three of the attackers were killed. Germany perhaps compounded their black eye by trading the facing trial attackers for hijacked Lufthansa Flight 615. Israel over the next years hunted down and killed two of the Palestinian attackers in operations that very much resembled Nazi Hunters from the decade before.

The Olympics were not a success. They had also cost three times what Mexico spent on the 1968 games. Waldi took a little bit of a hit to his reputation. The dachshund was supposed to represent resistance, tenacity, and agility. These are good things for an athlete. There were however now unofficial posters of Waldi using the Olympic Tower as a fire hydrant.

Well my drink is empty and and I will pour another to toast Waldi. Sure the Olympics didn’t work, but Germany was asking an awful lot from one of it’s plush toys. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2020.

When you are a senior statesman and well remembered in your own circles, it is natural to think that you would be doing better than your successors. What if the people then agree to give you the chance? Will you be able to relive your past glories with current success. Or will you realize that it isn’t easy and how much you have slowed down. President Paul von Hindenburg shows how badly things can go. 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 stamp shows you the predicament Weimar Germany was in. Look at how poor the printing is on this issue. Germany always was a center of stamp collecting so their designers would have good ideas for issues. Instead here is a poorly printed portrait of an 80 year old man.

Todays stamp is issue A61, a five Pfennig stamp issued by Weimar Germany in 1925. It was a nineteen stamp issue in different denominations and derivatives over many years. You may notice that the denomination seems more normal that the high ones of a few years before. In 1923 the Reichbank introduced the gold backed Rentenmark  that had removed 12 zeroes from all prices. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 60 cents used. An imperforate version is worth $105.

Paul von Hindenburg was born into a noble family in Posen, Prussia (now Poznan, Poland) in 1847. He joined the Prussian Army and served with distinction in the wars with Austria and France. After the Franco-Prussian War, Hindenburg earned a spot in the Kriegs Academy in Berlin that opened the way for a future on the General Staff. After he was passed over as head of the General Staff, he retired from the Army in 1912.

The Russian invasion of Eastern Prussia at the beginning of World War I saw Hindenburg come out of retirement and take charge of the defense against the Russians. The Germans attacked the Russian flank at Tannenberg and  killing 92,000 and turning the tide of the fighting in the east. That Tannenberg was also the site of a big Prussian defeat of Slavs in 1410 captured the imagination of the German people, and Hindenburg was the new hero.

Missing the chance to again retire in success Hindenburg was put in charge of the never ending trench warfare in the west. He succeeded again in the deepest penetrations into France. His army was tired and hungry however, with the average soldier down to 125 pounds, and the Allies never seemed to run out of reinforcements. After losing the Second battle of the Marne in 1918, the army fell back in defeat. His trusted deputy Eric Ludendorf, who had been with him since the beginning of the war began to have temper tantrums and crying jags. Six weeks before the end of the war Hindenburg informed the Kaiser as there was no further reserves to call on, it was time to sue for peace. Hindenburg retired from the army again in 1919, at age 72.

As a former Field Marshal, Hindenburg was given a staff and the city of Hanover gave him a luxury villa. He had a ghost written book that emphasized the positive that was later made into a movie. He was once called to the Reichstag by lefties to explain the war loss. He strode in and read a statement that the war was lost because the army was stabbed in the back by politicians and striking unions. He then marched out ignoring questions confident they wouldn’t arrest him. They didn’t, half the country agreed with him.

In 1925 he ran for President, though claiming to still be a Monarchist, fronting a coalition of right and center parties. He was 78. He hoped to get Germany working again and restore German greatness. He went through Chancellor after Chancellor but never found the right strategy to get beyond Germany’s problems. At the suggestion of his son, who was handling ever more of the workload, he appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor in 1932.

Hindenburg was however in his last years and couldn’t contain Hitler. A law was secretly passed that upon Hindenburg’s death there would be no more President just a leader who would be Hitler. You might have thought the military would have stayed loyal to the constitution. Hitler however had met, on the new German cruiser Deutschland with the head of the army and the navy and agreed in return for vague promises of disarming the SS and the brown shirts, the military would accept Hitler  as leader. Hindenburg died in 1934 at age 86 of lung cancer. He was buried at the Tannenberg war memorial until that was taken down by Poland after the war.

Well my drink is empty. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2021.

World War I horrors had a profound effect on the art of Europe, especially in Germany where the old system was not just discredited but gone. This expressionist movement aimed to shock and succeeded. A backlash was probably inevitable. 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.

Max Beckmann’s work displayed on this stamp is titled Junger Argentinier. Beckmann through his art was trying to move beyond the emotionalism and self obsession of the expressionist art movement. The dourness definitely remained.

Todays stamp is issue A1099, a 55 cent stamp issued by Germany on February 13th, 2003. It was issued in conjunction with a second stamp featuring a different artist. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 75 cents used.

Max Beckmann was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1884. He was into a well off but middle class family that afforded him an education steeped in the old masters. His early artistic output reflected this.

In World War I. Beckmann volunteered for service as a medic. In this role he experienced the horrors and loss. As with most of his contemporaries, his postwar art  became less literal and realistic. He was them awarded a prestigious teaching position at the Stadelschule Academy of Fine Art in Frankfort.

As his art matured, Beckmann began to reject the excesses of other expressionists and joined a movement toward a new objectivity in art. This was a more back to business style more reflective of America where the war was less impactful.

Beckmann was not alone in thinking the Expressionists had gone to far. On the far right in Germany there was a yearning to get back to a style of art that uplifted, was pro family and patriotic. Beckmann was not a fellow traveler in that.

With Nazi control of the institutions, Beckmann was dismissed from his teaching position. It then went  further with his art on the list of those to be removed from museams and galleries. As a final insult, Hitler labeled modern art as degenerate and a traveling show was hastily arraigned to display the art now banned in a mocking manner. The show included works by Beckmann. The day after the Degenerate art show opened in Munich, Beckmann and his family moved to Amsterdam in Holland. He was not Jewish.

It took 10 more years for Beckmann to achieve his goal of moving to the United States. The Nazis were not done torturing Beckmann. Still in German occupied Holland and near 60, there was an attempt to draft him into the army. In 1947 he was finally allowed to come to the USA and given a teaching position at Saint Louis University. He died three years later.

Well my drink is empty. Understanding the troubles Beckmann faced, one can understand the dourness of his work. I can understand the right’s desire from more uplifting art, but perhaps that needs to happen organically when times are better. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.

The Junkers F 13 was an innovative product of a great man with a united country behind him. The industry he worked in now requires a consortium of companies and countries to ever more rarely bring a product to market. In the optimism of 1991, Germany can be forgiven to look back fondly at what was accomplished and imagining it could happen again. 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.

If there is a failure in the aesthetics of this stamp, it is not capturing how radical this airplane would have looked in 1919. It was a world of open cockpit biplanes. The stamp does however show you the characteristic corrugated alluminum alloy skin that made the advancement possible. So as with so many stamps, the more you look the more you see.

Todays stamp is issue A711, a 30 pfennig stamp issued by Germany on April 9th 1991. It was a 4 stamp issue in various denominations remembering German pre war civilian airplanes and airships. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 35 cents whether mint or used.

Hugo Junkers founded his company in 1895 in Dessau, Germany initially manufacturing boilers and radiators. Hugo had some radical ideas for getting into the manufacture of airplanes. He had the idea that aluminum could be made strong enough that the skin of an airplane could be made integral to it’s structure. This would reduce weight and allow for better aerodynamics. To make this work, Junkers developed an age hardened alloy of aluminum that they called Duralumin and further strengthened the metal by corrugating it. The resulting F 13 airliner of 1919 was thus a revelation facing the post World War I need for civilian airliners.

Hugo Junkers had to work hard to market his airplane. One thing he did was start his own airline that in turn bought over 60 of the airplane. His airline was eventually in 1926 merged with an airline subsidiary of the Lloyd’s shipping line to form Lufthansa which in turn took another 72 F13s. Junkers offered low down payments and lease deals that got F13s flying all over the world. The planes had a variety of different engines mostly from Daimler Benz, BMW, and in house Junkers designs, but the airframe was perhaps more advanced than the engines available. Over 300 F13s were built by 1932 and the technology developed was still very much in evidence in the later larger and more numerous tri motor Junkers airliners.

As the politics in Germany changed it became quite bad personally for Hugo Junkers. He was requested by the Nazi government to participate in the rearming of Germany. Hugo said no thank you. He was then put under house arrest and told to give up his stock in the company he founded and all of his patents. In exchange, Hugo would not be tried for high treason. Hugo was an older man by then not up to the stress coming his way and he died at home still under arrest. The stolen company then went on to build many notable warplanes such as the Stuka dive bomber. In the 1960s the remnants of the Junkers operation were merged into Messerschmitt.

In 2016, a new build replica of the Junkers F-13 was built as a personal tribute to Hugo Junkers. Though it had a radio and a transponder, it was otherwise original including a rebuilt 1930s vintage Pratt and Whitney radial engine. The technicians and engineers on the project had so much fun, that they agreed to take further orders and at least 4 new builds have been completed. Not bad for a now over 100 year old airplane.

Well my drink is empty but I will be ready the next time Germany wants to toast Hugo Junkers. Come again for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.