Jamming the Discourse Network: Politics and the Postcard in Early Twentieth-Century Germany

Bernhard Siegert reads the postcard as a cultural technique of standardised communication, and argues that when it superseded the letter–once the means of producing the individual–individual subjectivity was itself destroyed. This argument excludes a long history of disruptive intervention in the postal system, of which the Mail Art movement is the classical period. Here I will turn to an earlier episode in which artists like Duchamp, Grosz, and Doesburg created a genre of altered postcards, thereby subverting the mass-produced sentiments that had recently begun to circulated via this medium. This activity constituted a form of publication – a frequently made assertion the implications of which are usually left vague. I will here attempt a sketch of these referring to Negt and Kluge’s work on counter public spheres. The Weimar era in which such publics could operate was one of relatively free expression: under the National Socialists, by contrast, Willi Baumeister had to send his doctored postcards of Nazi artworks in sealed envelopes. The risk of this strategy was made clear by the fate of the Hampels, a working-class couple who left postcards protesting the regime in public places, and who were executed as a result – their individual subjectivity destroyed not by postcards, but by a regime that demanded absolute control over discourse networks. These cases illustrate the limits of the cultural technique as an heuristic tool and also of the postcard as a means of resistance, and so contribute to a fuller history of the postcard as a medium.