2851 GERMANY - "Outdoor nudes jumping" by Gerhard Riebicke

2851 "Outdoor nudes jumping" by Gerhard Riebicke (1925)

Born in 1878 in Lausitz (now Forst), Gerhard Riebicke spent his childhood in Switzerland. Then he studied in Tubingen, worked as a house teacher in Posen (now Poznań), and in the meantime learned  the technique of photography alone, as autodidact. In 1909 he became press photographer in Berlin. Gradually, his focus was on sports and Free Body Culture photography (ball games, jumps, dance and bathing scenes).

2200 FRANCE - The Network No Pasaran

This postcard was issued probably in 2009 by the French Network No Pasaran, and  is a (bad) reproduction of a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), a French photographer considered the master of  candid photography (Bremen - Lunchtime rest in the shipyards / 1962). He spent more than three decades on assignment for Life and other journals, traveling and documenting some of the great upheavals of the 20th century: the Spanish Civil War, the liberation of Paris in 1944, the 1968 student rebellion in Paris, the fall of the Kuomintang to the communists, the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the Berlin Wall, and the deserts of Egypt.

1786 GERMANY (Baden-Württemberg) - Women with Bollenhut

A Bollenhut is a formal headdress worn since about c.1750 by Protestant women as part of their local costume (Tracht) in three neighbouring villages of Gutach, Kirnbach and Hornberg-Reichenbach, in Black Forest (a great forested mountain range in the state of Baden-Württemberg, in southwestern Germany, bounded by the Rhine valley to the west and south). With its woollen pompoms, the picturesque-looking red Bollenhut has become a symbol of the Black Forest as a whole, despite its very local origins. The red pom-poms and white brim of the Bollenhut also is said to have inspired the top layer of the Black Forest Cake.

1334, 1335, 1603 GERMANY (Berlin) - The Berlin Wall

1334 Berlin - Conrad Shumann overcoming,
on 08.15.1961, the barbed wire at the Bernauer Strasse

Posted on 15.11.2014, 23.05.2015
The Berlin Wall (German: Berliner Mauer) was undoubtedly the most powerful symbol of the Iron Curtain, that separated the Western Bloc (the United States and its NATO allies) and the powers in the Eastern Bloc (the Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact) during the Cold War. It was constructed by the German Democratic Republic starting on 13 August 1961, and completely cut off (by land) West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin until it was opened in 1989. The Eastern Bloc claimed that the wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the "will of the people" in building a socialist state in East Germany, but in practice it served to prevent the massive emigration and defection that marked East Germany and the communist Eastern Bloc during the post-WWII period. Before the Wall's erection, 3.5 million East Germans circumvented Eastern Bloc emigration restrictions and defected from the GDR, but between 1961 and 1989, the wall prevented almost all such emigration. During this period, around 5,000 people attempted to escape over the wall, with an estimated death toll of from 136 to more than 200 in and around Berlin.

1335 The fall of the Berlin Wall, 9 November 1989

In the first postcard is an East German soldier, named Conrad Schumann, leaping over barbed wire into West Berlin. Born in Saxony in 1942, Schumann enlisted in the East German police following his 18th birthday. After a training in Dresden, he was posted to a non-commissioned officers' college in Potsdam, after which he volunteered for service in Berlin. On 15 August 1961, he was sent to the corner of Ruppiner Strasse and Bernauer Strasse to guard the Berlin Wall on its third day of construction. From the other side, West Germans shouted to him, "Komm' rüber!" (Come over!), and a police car pulled up to wait for him. Schumann jumped over the barbed wire fence and was promptly driven away by the West Berlin police. The photo made by Peter Leibing has since become an iconic image of the Cold War era, and was inducted into the UNESCO Memory of the World programme. Schumann settled in Bavaria, where it was married, but his life has never been normal. On 20 June 1998, suffering from depression, he committed suicide by hanging himself.

Berlin - East Side Gallery
(the postcard contains a capsule with a fragment of the Berlin Wall)

The Revolutions of 1989, part of the revolutionary wave that resulted in the Fall of Communism in the states of Central and Eastern Europe, have led to radical political changes in the Eastern Bloc. After several weeks of civil unrest, the East German government announced on 9 November 1989 that all GDR citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. Crowds of East Germans crossed and climbed onto the wall, joined by West Germans on the other side in a celebratory atmosphere (in the second postcard). Over the next few weeks, euphoric public and souvenir hunters chipped away parts of the wall; the governments later used industrial equipment to remove most of what was left. Contrary to popular belief, the wall's demolition didn't begin until Summer 1990 and was not completed until 1992. The fall of the Berlin Wall paved the way for German reunification, which was formally concluded on 3 October 1990.

0692 GERMANY (Hesse) - Schwälmer Tracht

If you find that the girl in this postcard looks like Little Red Riding Hood, you're not wrong, because the story of Brothers Grimm originates in the Schwalm, from where also come the children from the picture. The Schwalm is a small area situated in the north of the German state of Hesse, through which flows the river of the same name.

0687 GERMANY (Baden-Württemberg) - The Swabian-Alemannic Fasnet in Freiburg

Fasnet (Fasnacht) is a carnival celebrated in the towns and villages of the Alpine areas of Austria, Southern Germany, the Black Forest, the area around Lake Constance, and in German-speaking France and Switzerland, wherever Alemannic tribes had settled. It is more a pagan affair, in which the old traditions of driving out winter have mingled with the pre-Lenten celebrations. The celebrants dress as spirits, demons, and witches, wearing heavy wooden masks, intricately carved and handed down from generation to generation. Recurring over and over are representations of the Wise Fool with smooth, serene, pale faces, scary witches with grotesque features and animal masks of all kinds, and masks of mythological characters that figure in local lore and history. The Zünfte (craftsmen's guilds) first began this custom. Today, only the name Narrenzunft (fools' guild), used for the clubs organizing the festivities, reminds us of this historical background.