Welcome to a special weekend offering from The Philatelist. Today is a special Veterans Day as it is the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I that inspired the holiday. I chose a German stamp from their new government in 1919 that well captures the devastation of that war. 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.
Todays stamp shows a tree stump with a little bit of new growth coming out of it. Imagine a country presenting itself that way. This was a German stamp issue, not emanating from some sort of occupation force. The best the government of the time could muster was that we are not dead yet. There is an honesty to this stamp that I find deeply moving. Even the printing and the paper quality are far below typical German standards, a reflection of the difficult time. In the post office at the time, you could still use new printings of old Imperial German issues. I covered one of those here, https://the-philatelist.com/2018/06/19/germany-1920-if-we-are-still-a-reich-what-happened-at-weimar/. You still had some clinging to the old but the world changed and not just in Germany but throughout Europe.
The stamp today is issue A23, a 10 Pfennig stamp issued by the National Assembly government of Germany in 1919. It was part of a three stamp issue in various denominations. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth $1.50.
Between 16 and 19 million people died in World War I. In France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary we are talking 4 percent of the population and that is not including the many more injured or as they said then shell shocked. Turkey’s percentages are even higher but include the Armenian genocide that was tendential to the war itself. Britain and Russia also had over 2 percent dead and the devastation lead in Russia to revolution and a total reordering of society. In Britain we see the cracks in the empire. The British percentage of deaths is 8 times the percentage of the empire as a whole. Parts of the empire that were not ethnically British mostly sat it out. This told the British that their time in such places was nearly up. The natives just did not feel part of things enough to fight for King and Empire.
We have talked some about deaths because the annihilation did so much to change Europe. Like the new growth on the stamp though, Veteran’s Day is about remembering the survivors to thank them for what they have been through in service to their country. Those from World War I have all aged out now but we can still thank the many veterans from the all too frequent wars since. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.