From 1897 to 1921

The postcard as social media from back then

Evelyn Fertl dealt with postcards up to 1921.

(Bild: BLB/Christine Heckenast)

Do you still write postcards? It was quite normal in the last century. Evelyn Fertl, archivist at the Provincial Archives, has written a book about postcards from 1897 to 1921. 

Warm greetings, kisses and hand-kisses - the illustrated postcard in the German-West Hungarian-Burgenland region. This is the name of the book, in which Evelyn Fertl provides an insight into the messages of the card writers, analyzes them and highlights the social functions of postcards.

She herself began working on this topic in 2017. The reason: she was due to give a lecture at the Mogersdorf symposium. "I thought about writing something about picture postcards and in the course of my research I realized that there was actually nothing about the texts," she says. It wasn't until around 2010 that researchers started to look into them. Before that, the focus was more on photos and film footage. "It is also very interesting to analyze the texts," says Fertl. She has discovered a lot in her research. On the one hand, postcards used to be exactly what social media is today. "They were used to show that I'm on vacation here and there. They were just as much a means of self-expression as Facebook, Insta or WhatsApp are today," she explains. But they were also used to place orders. "For example, to run errands or send money," says the historian.

Particularly interesting for her: You get an insight into the life of the little man. After all, it is usually the upper classes or the nobility from whom things have been preserved and researched. 102 postcards are printed in full in the book, and there are text excerpts from more than 1000 others. Order the book from the Provincial Archives on 02682/ 600-2351.