Collection of personal letters enclosed in mailing envelopes affixed with labels bearing vicious antisemitic ...

Collection of personal letters enclosed in mailing envelopes affixed with labels bearing vicious antisemitic content. Germany, 1920.

A collection of 15 personal letters sent to a young woman named Trude Gasch in Dresden by a childhood friend named Hans, addressed to Liebestraße 5.I from various locations across Germany. The letters were sent from different cities over the course of 1920, including Zwickau, Mannheim, Dortmund, and other cities. All the envelopes were affixed with a sticker bearing blatantly antisemitic content, usually taken from early quotes by German antisemites – an example of the everyday antisemitism in 1920s Germany.

For example, the green stickers bore the following printed texts:

"The social question can be resolved only on the solid foundation of the national question. But within the social question, the Jewish question plays the principal role." – Knight Georg von Schönerer, "The Jews are a cosmopolitan, irritating, and disruptive element in the family of human nations; they do not allow themselves to be absorbed by other peoples, but rather tend and are able to destroy the beliefs, customs, traditions, and economies of other nations." – The socialist Albert Schaeffle, "The Jews establish a state within a state; by obeying their own laws, they know how to circumvent the laws of the state." – Count Moltke, "They maintain their own government, religion, customs, and language; by obeying their own laws, the Jews know how to circumvent the laws of the land and reject every attempt at their assimilation into the nation." – Moltke, "There is no nation in the world in which so few marriages are based on love as among them: further proof of the absolute Jew’s spiritual detachment." – Dr. Yehuda Dr. O. Weininger, "The true god of the Jews is money or the golden calf" – Prof. Wermund, and others.

All the envelopes contain letters, as mentioned, of a personal nature. The content of the letters has not been thoroughly examined by us. 

In the early 1920s, following World War I and with the collapse of the Weimar Republic, a widespread phenomenon emerged across German cities involving the distribution of antisemitic stickers. Nationalist, monarchist, and antisemitic elements - some organized and some acting individually—printed and circulated small stickers featuring quotes, slogans, or anti-Jewish propaganda. These stickers were affixed to envelopes, walls, shop doors, and the homes of Jews. The goal was to implant the idea that Jews constituted a “foreign body” within the German nation - an everyday form of propaganda meant to accompany the public in their daily surroundings. The stickers often appeared innocuous at first glance - small slips of paper bearing “scholarly” quotes or pseudo-intellectual phrasing, but were in fact tools of hate dissemination during a time of political and economic instability, many years before the Nazis came to power. In this way, antisemitism penetrated daily life and became an inseparable part of the public sphere as early as the 1920s in Germany.

15 envelopes (some containing letters several pages long). Good – very good condition.