The German Private Posts 1871 - 1900
Peter Rogers, The Royal Philatelic Society London
22 May 2003
This paper first presents a summary of the circumstances which gave rise to the Private Posts; it describes their growth, their successes and failures, the vicissitudes they suffered at the hands of the Reichspost, and their ultimate abolition. Then, two contrasting Private Posts will be considered in more detail - the Leipzig Courier and the Berlin Packetfahrt. The paper concludes with a brief mention of the post-1900 events.
The Private Posts
The story begins in 1871, the year of German unification and the founding of the Second Reich. In the October of that year the newly elected Reichstag passed a series of Postal Laws establishing, inter alia, a national postal system, the Reichspost, and giving it a certain monopoly in the handling of mail. This, in effect, said that:
The carriage, for payment, of all sealed, sewn-up or otherwise closed letters... from one locality with a post office to another locality with a post office, in the interior or abroad, by any means except the Reichspost, is forbidden.
In essence, only the Reichspost was permitted to carry sealed letters from place to place. No reference was made to the handling of any other forms of mail between localities (except certain types of newspaper which have no relevance to this study), or to the handling of all forms of mail inside the boundaries of the locality. On the face of it, private postal organisations could quite legally compete with the Reichspost for the handling of these forms of mail. For long the provisions of the Law were thought to be an error of omission on behalf of the legislators, unintentionally permitting postal competition. However, after 1989 when the Potsdam Archives were once again open to researchers, it became evident that the wording of the Law was taken directly from the 1867 postal regulations of the North German Confederation which, in turn, were derived from the Prussian regulations of 1852. The Reichspost's limited monopoly was therefore no more than a continuation of policy.
There was no rush to rise to the challenge and the first entrepreneur to take advantage of the circumstances was J.J. Schreiber who, on 27 May 1873, opened his Brief und Druckschriften-Expedition in Berlin. From this distance it would appear that he did most things right. He issued only one fragile 2 pf stamp and confined himself, in the main, to postcard and printed matter mail - although he later offered a money order service. His claim to fame is as the pioneer in the selling of advertising space on the reverse of his postal stationery cards. Despite all, the firm closed down in August 1874. Why? We are not sure. The German economy slumped in 1874 and the Berlin Stock Exchange collapsed that year, and these events may have hastened Schreiber's end. However, it is probably true to say that there was not sufficient economic or social activity in Berlin at the time to generate a great need for local mail - and what need there was could easily be met by the Reichspost.
The next significant event in the history of the Private Posts was the start of a full letter service by the Berlin Packetfahrt in June 1886. The Packetfahrt had been founded in 1884 as a parcel carrier (as its name implies) and it became later a carrier of persons by omnibus. It had begun to handle bulk printed matter as early as December 1884 but in January 1886 it decided to compete with the Reichspost for all forms of mail in Berlin. There is some doubt over precisely when the service started and it is possible that the Packetfahrt was pre-empted, if only by a few days, by the short-lived Berliner Verkehrs-Anstalt HANSA.
The lead taken by the Packetfahrt proved to be an inspiration to others. It started the snowball rolling down the hill and by the end of 1886 a further 29 companies were in business. Sadly, the HANSA was not among them as it had closed its doors on 19 November that year. Ultimately, some 250 private postal companies operated in 164 towns and cities before the Private Post era was brought to a close in 1900.
The key to the success of the Private Posts lay, first, in their ability to obtain and retain the trust and esteem of their customers and, second, in their ability to compete with the Reichspost by undercutting its postal tariffs. It was not easy to establish the former and many of those firms which did not soon went to the wall. On the other hand, with a relatively densely populated area of operations, compared to the Reichspost's nation-wide responsibility, it was not difficult to undercut the Reichspost. Typically, the Private Posts charged 2 pf for postcards and addressed printed matter, and 3 pf for letters; the Reichspost flat rate for these mail categories was 5 pf rising to 10 pf for letters in Berlin. The Private Posts, in addition, made handsome profits from the mass distribution of unaddressed printed matter and many of them also operated parcel post services - which, incidentally, were always a matter for private enterprise and which were never subject to the Postal Law. There are instances of private posts competing with each other in some of the larger cities, usually with disastrous consequences for one or the other of the antagonists, but the real enemy was the Reichspost.
To the Reichspost, the Private Posts were competitors to be taken very seriously. It set up a "special surveillance" office with the task of publicising in national and local newspapers the shortcomings and failures of the Private Posts. Thus were broadcast tales, real or imaginary, of indecent material passing through the private system and of private post mail bags found floating down the river.
More successfully, the Reichspost took out an injunction against the use of the word "Post" on their stamps and materials by the Private Posts. It was argued that the word was a proper noun belonging only to the Reichspost and that therefore the private organisations should be prohibited from using it. Thus we find instances, at Dortmund for example, where blue crayon was used to strike out the word "Post" on every one of the Briefbeförderung Courier's stamps, and Dresden where the word was not only obliterated on the Verkehrs-Anstalt Hansa's postal stationery material but also removed from the canceller. The embargo on the use of the word was not universally applied. It was ignored in Wiesbaden, for instance - and the fact that the Wiesbaden chief of police, August Höhn, was himself a serious philatelist may have had something to do with that. In Strassburg, the Privat-Brief-Verkehr was required to change its canceller because it looked too much like the Reichspost's. August Kirchhoffer, who had interests in a number of private posts, had to overprint his 2 pf blue stamps with a large red figure 2 because the stamp allegedly bore a close resemblance to the Reichspost's own 20 pf stamp .The Reichspost invented the concept of 'public air space'; obviously, it was unacceptable for the private posts to position their letter boxes on the public footpath or hang them on public street furniture - but the Reichspost argued successfully that, even if the boxes were mounted on the wall of a private property, they would still project out into public air space! That is the reason why many private posts mounted their boxes inside the premises of tobacconists, newsagents and the like. The private post customer paid heavily for mistakenly posting his letter in the wrong box. If it was delivered by the Reichspost, rather than being returned to the private post (or perhaps in some instances destroyed), it was done so at a cost. The Bavarian State Post, which then had a degree of autonomy, levied 6 pf postage due on any Munich or Nuremberg Courier 1 1/2 pf postcards found in its boxes. The extreme case, however, was the 20 pf fee charged by the Reichspost on some Berlin Packetfahrt 3 pf letters incorrectly posted.
Despite constant harassment of this nature by the Reichspost, the Private Posts, provided they were well-capitalised and well-managed, were very profitable concerns. The Munich Courier, for instance, delivered 2 million pieces of mail over the New Year of 1897-98 - or roughly 5 for every man, woman and child in the population at that time. By the last years of the century the Berlin Packetfahrt was handling a greater percentage of the Berlin mail than the Reichspost. It is estimated that by 1896 the Private Posts were making annual net profits of half a million gold marks.
Statistics of this nature brought home to the Reichspost managers the potential profits they were losing to private enterprise and provided them with ammunition in their lobbying for a change in the Law or, at least, a more favourable interpretation of it. Paradoxically, however, the staunchest supporter of the Private Posts was the Postmaster-General himself. Dr Heinrich von Stephan, who had been PMG since 1871, held the view that the small man should have his day. In a speech to the Reichstag in January 1896, he said words to the effect that:
The Reichspost, with its abundant resources, certainly permits the private companies to earn their bread and is pleased that some of the more onerous tasks are taken over by them.
However, von Stephan died in 1898 and his successor, Victor von Podbielski, a former agriculture minister and friend of the Kaiser, held distinctly less benevolent views - he is quoted as saying this stake in the flesh of the Reichspost must be removed. Under his aegis the Reichstag sanctioned a change to the Postal Law on 20 December 1899. Article 2 of the new Supplementary Law stated:
Closed letters which circulate within the limits of a place of origin provided with a post office cannot be sent otherwise than by the Reichspost.
If that was not sufficient to kill off the Private Posts, Article 3 certainly was. It stated that:
Commercially based institutions for the collection, conveyance or delivery of sealed letters, cards, printed matter and samples of merchandise, addressed to individual recipients, are forbidden to operate on and after 1 April 1900.
Effectively, that left the Private Posts with only unaddressed printed matter - junk mail - and none of them could survive on that alone. 31 March 1900 thus marked the end of the era.
The Private Posts were relatively well compensated for the disaster which had overtaken them. Compensation was paid by the Reichspost (together with the Bavarian and Württemberg State posts which then retained some autonomy) to those institutions which were in operation before 1 April 1898 and which continued to operate without interruption until the publication of the new Law. Provided they could show that they had made a profit during the previous years, the owners were compensated for the loss of potential profits over the next ten years and were reimbursed for their actual losses from the depreciation of equipment, uniforms, stamps, rentals and so on. Employees with at least three months service prior to the announcement of the Law, and who had now lost their livelihood, were either compensated according to the length of time served or were taken on by the Reichspost. Eighty-eight institutions were compensated in this way as were 1148 employees; a further 747 employees were taken into the service of the Reichspost. The total cost to the Reichspost was in the region of 8.2 million marks. As a gesture towards public opinion, the Reichspost was induced, from 1 April 1900, to lower its postcard rate from 5 pf to the 2 pf previously enjoyed by the Private Post customers.
To mark the end of the era, a number of the Private Post operators issued 'Farewell' cards (Abschiedskarten) - some of them ingenious, some humorous and most of them attractive. The palm goes, perhaps, to the Erfurt Courier which laminated its 3 pf Abschiedskarte to the reverse of the new Reichspost 2 pf card so that it could be collected by the one on 31 March 1900 and delivered by the other on the following day!
The Leipzig Courier
A city the size of Leipzig without a private letter post was, in the summer of 1892, an appealing prospect for a private post entrepreneur. Six years earlier the Privat-Brief-Verkehr had closed its boxes after a brief 3-month existence and now the city played host only to two parcel companies. Ernst Schmalfuss saw his opportunity and his Leipzig Courier began a full letter service on 18 August 1892. In a newspaper advertisement and a prospectus heralding the start of the service, Schmalfuss described himself as a 64-year old Evangelical Lutheran with experience as an estate manager, and as an adviser to a life insurance company; he had run a tree nursery and claimed to have planted 1800 km of German railway track with trees. These were not what one might consider to be ideal qualifications for running a private post. Nevertheless, judged by the number of examples of his early mail still in existence today, the Courier got away to a good start.
The basic tariff was 2 pf for printed matter, 3 pf for letters and postcards and 3 1/2 pf for letter-cards but, like many private post owners Schmalfuss adjusted his tariff in the light of experience and his postcard rate dropped to 2 1/2pf in the October. Like many private post owners, Schmalfuss misjudged demand for his stamps and was obliged to surcharge his 2 pf stamps with a large figure "3" before taking delivery of his well-known 'Rider' stamps in November. He introduced a 15 pf registered letter service and money order service, and in early 1893 he expanded his area of operations from the city centre to the outlying suburbs. However, Schmalfuss had greater things in mind and on 9 March 1893 he opened 26 branch offices, and on 10 April a further 28, in the villages, towns and cities surrounding Leipzig - all of which were served by the extensive rail network in that area. He believed he could offer an out-of-town service to rival that of the Reichspost. The Courier's area of operations extended from Erfurt in the west to Dresden in the east, a straight-line distance of about 250 km, and from Bitterfeld in the north to Plauen in the south, close to the Bohemian border.
Schmalfuss issued distinctive 2, 3 and 5 pf stamps for use by the branch offices together with 2 1/2pf postcards and 3 1/2pf letter-cards for internal use, and 3 pf postcards and 5 pf postal stationery envelopes for out-of-town use; the latter had ungummed flaps so that their use could not contravene the prohibition on out-of-town sealed letters. These materials were delivered to the branch office operators in numbers roughly proportional to the population of the locality. Schmalfuss issued his branch operators, who were employed on an expense and profit sharing basis, with the essential materials including high quality bronze cancellers for the larger offices and rubber for some of the smaller. His method of operation was to have his postmen riding sectors of the rail routes collecting mail from and delivering it to the branch operators who met the trains. He required the operators to apply both departure and arrival cancels and thus it is possible to see the rapidity with which mail circulated throughout the system. The rail routes around Leipzig fell naturally into three sectors. Departure and arrival times for intra-sector mail were rarely more than an hour or two apart; inter-sector mail, most of which had to pass through Leipzig, generally took a few hours longer.
So far, one can only have admiration for the administrative and organisational skills shown by Schmalfuss in getting such an elaborate system up and running in a relatively short time and in, as far as we can now determine, a reasonably efficient manner. The same cannot be said about his financial acumen - or his business plan. The system was manpower intensive and, in the short term, was just not producing sufficient revenue. Disaster loomed and when, on 25 April 1893, Schmalfuss was presented with a bill for some 9900 Mk by the printer of the stamps and stationery, Ladislaus Bayer. Schmalfuss could not meet the bill and disappeared, taking with him all the cash he could lay his hands on including the postmen's indemnity deposits.
The organisation continued to operate for a few more days but was obliged to declare itself bankrupt on 10 May 1893. The printer Bayer, the principle creditor, attempted to take over the business but was thwarted by what we would now call a management buy-out. The managers and staff pooled their resources to keep the Courier afloat. Bayer, incensed, declared his intention of opening a rival post using the same name and, with the assistance of an experienced private post operator from Magdeburg, he succeeded in doing so in mid-June. The reality of Bayer's threat induced the Courier to overprint, on 10 May, all its stamps and postal stationery with control marks. Four types were used - a device referred to as a Stern (star) and three different monograms of the initials "LC".
From mid-June there was then the ludicrous situation of two identically-named posts, using basically the same stamps and postal stationery, competing for business from a clientele whose trust, and therefore willingness to use the private post, must surely have been undermined by the circumstances. The added competition killed-off the ex-Schmalfuss Courier. Although it issued new stamps and stationery on 28 May, and even opened two suburban offices in Plagwitz-Lindenau and Reudnitz in June, it closed for good on 15 July 1893. The Bayer Courier survived it by a few months only.
Meanwhile, out in the field, the bankruptcy induced a dozen of the smaller offices to close. Most of the remaining branch office operators, now virtually independent, also applied control marks to their stamps and stationery. These in the main used the name of the locality or devices related to its coat of arms. Inter-office mail continued to circulate around the rail routes, but inevitably at a reduced level, and the network ceased to function entirely on 10 July 1893, just five days before its parent closed down. So ended the only serious attempt made by a private post to compete with the Reichspost for out-of-town mail.
The Berlin Packetfahrt
From the sad failure of the Leipzig Courier, we turn to the great success story of the Private Post era. The Berlin Packetfahrt was the biggest, the most successful, certainly the most innovative and the longest lived of them all. There is still doubt over exactly when it began its letter service - Carl Schmidt in his 1939 Handbook gave a date of 18 June 1886 but the earliest known cancellation is 26 June. It was a public limited company with an initial share capital of 1 million marks. It had, like many of the private posts, a few start-up problems and in its first year it made a loss of 1/2 million marks. It was not until 1890 that it made a dividend payment - of 6%, but by 1896 the annual dividend had risen to 25%. In 1898 it handled 89 million items of which 45 million were sealed letters. During 1899 and up to the end of March 1900 it handled 104,593,400 pieces of mail of which 13,226,00 were registered letters. In addition it handled over 2 1/2million parcels a year. To put these figures into context, in the later years the Packetfahrt was dealing with some 55% of Berlin's local mail - a greater quantity than the Reichspost itself.
Along the way, the Packetfahrt saw off the competition from four other private posts, including the aforementioned HANSA. However, the Berliner Privatpost und Spedition AG, which opened for business on 1 October 1895, proved to be a very serious competitor - so much so that the Packetfahrt resorted, two years later, to buying it out. In that year, 1897, the Packetfahrt's annual dividend dropped from 25 to 20% - cause and effect!
Among the reasons for the success of the Packetfahrt, in addition to its ability to undercut the Reichspost tariffs, were its willingness to innovate and, in the interests of providing the best possible service, its readiness to adapt to customer requirements and demands. It met the growing demand for advertising by offering to provide printed-to-private-order postal stationery, envelopes, postcards and wrappers, with any desired imprint, at no extra charge. The response was huge and philatelists are still struggling to compile a complete listing of the many thousands of postal stationery items which resulted. In 1886 the Packetfahrt introduced the letter-card or Kartenbrief (which the Reichspost did not offer until 1897) and later issued a number of variations on the theme. The Packetfahrt kept its registered and express mail rates down to 10 pf compared to the Reichspost rates of 20 and 25 pf respectively; for a period, it reduced its printed matter letter rate to 1 pf; it offered money order and cash-on-delivery services, and newspaper delivery. It undertook to deliver, before 9 o'clock each morning, free of additional charge, time-sensitive stock exchange documents, Schlussschein, provided that the envelopes were marked with that word or some variant of it. It sanctioned the use of order card booklets such as those offered to its customers annually by the coal-merchant Gustav Schiebel; it undertook to deliver, in Berlin, bulk mail parcelled-up and sent from elsewhere; it experimented with automatic vending machines dispensing postal stationery card and envelopes - although the great scarcity of Automatischer Verkauf items suggests that the idea did not catch on. It made concessions to newspapers permitting them to use their own versions of a Packetfahrt imprinted stamp on subscription and advertising cards. It gave reduced rate or free post facilities to charitable concerns and, in the case of the Stenographers' Society and the Booksellers' Society, it permitted the use of the societies' own undenominated stamps; it also provided temporary post office facilities at charity events. It issued a number of commemorative items, mostly connected with the German Royal Family, and supported the 1896 Industrial Exhibition with stamps and stationery. Two instances where the Packetfahrt's innovations may not have met with continuing success were New Year envelopes and picture postcards. Very attractive 5 or 10 pf envelopes, containing even more attractive message cards, were issued annually from 1887 to 1895. Thereafter, plain 3 or 5 pf New Year envelopes appeared each year suggesting a change in customer demand. In 1898 and 99 it issued a series of 3 pf picture postcards bearing views of Berlin. The great scarcity of used examples, and to a lesser extent of the unused, suggest that these were not as popular as some of the Packetfahrt's other innovations.
But, it had to end - and like the rest of the Private Posts the Packetfahrt closed its boxes on 31 March 1900 and went into liquidation. It received its share of the compensation paid by the Reichspost - some 2.7 million marks or 45% of the total pay-out. 521 employees were compensated and another 334 were taken on by the Reichspost.
Epilogue
Unlike some of the other Private Posts, the Packetfahrt did not issue a Farewell card. Why? - perhaps because it never intended to say farewell! Entrepreneurs in places like Chemnitz, Hannover, Leipzig and Magdeburg attempted to circumvent the Supplementary Postal Law by operating various pseudo-postal schemes but without lasting success. The Packetfahrt rose again, slimmed down and reorganised under a new management structure. Its core business remained carrier and parcel services but it developed other services which were still legal including the delivery of unaddressed or generically addressed printed matter, the collection of account payments and subscriptions, and a restricted express letter service. It continued to use adhesive stamps for accounting purposes up to 1929. Thereafter it became virtually invisible philatelically as a warehouse and haulage contractor until it disappeared from the Berlin Yellow Pages in 1960.
References
Carl Schmidt: Handbuch der Deutschen Privat-Postwertzeichen, Band
I. 1939, Leipzig.
Georg Glasewald: Privatpostmarken Katalog. 1953, Hamburg.
Hans Meier zu Eissen: Die Deutschen Privatpost-Anstalten, Band I.
1979, Münster.
Hans Meier zu Eissen: Die Deutsche Privatpost Courier & Boteninstitute,
Band IV. 1997 Münster
Horst Müller: MICHEL Spezial-Katalog der Deutschen Privatpostmarken.
1999, Witten
Horst Müller: 31st March 1900: The End of the German Private Postal
System in Stadtpost No 12, December 1984.
Horst Müller: The Commencement of Letter Delivery by the Berlin Packetfahrt
(Trans. B. McGrath) in Stadtpost No 42, June 1992.
Heinz Frost: The Private Post in Berlin (Trans. Dr W.J.D. Annand) in Stadtpost No
46, June 1993.
Leipzig Courier: The Schmalfuss Prospectus (Trans. Dr W.J.D. Annand). Stadtpost No
52, December 1994.
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