Postkarten und die deutsche Wende: Zur Temporalitat des Mediums in Zeiten des gesellschaftlichen Umbruchs

Abstract

The golden age of postcards at the beginning of the 20th century triggered a fascination and a veritable collecting mania for this medium. After the Second World War, this rush largely subsided and the postcard became an everyday means of communication. Correspondence on postcards also accompanied historical periods of upheaval during this time, including the peaceful revolution and the German reunification in 1989/90. Political events came thick and fast in the noticeable condensation of the present and postal latency could barely keep pace with the rapid changes. Nevertheless, postcards from this period and the messages of the writers capture the world of experience in upheaval and share it with family and friends. In this article, I explore the question of how forms of temporality are inscribed on (picture) postcards from the period of German reunification. The aim of historical-ethnographic research on postcards from the period of upheaval is to work out perceptions and experiences of temporalities and to locate them in the context of political and individual changes. The combined analysis of image and text can therefore depict the actors’ worlds of experience and their horizons of expectation and describe the postcards as a temporal, holistic research object. Postcards thus break with an ethnographic now and take place simultaneously on several temporal levels.