Ernst Theodor Amandus Litfaß, who was given the respectful nickname “Advertising King” during his lifetime, is one of the most ingenious minds of the 19th century. His name is still widely known today thanks to the advertising pillars named after him, thousands of which shaped the cityscape of Berlin, as well as many other cities. As the owner of a printer’s shop, a publisher, inventor, publicist, event manager and amateur artist, Litfaß sure earned his merits. And last but not least, his social commitment earned him a good reputation and the respect of his contemporaries.
An artist’s soul bows to pressure
Ernst Litfaß was born on 11th February 1816 in Berlin and came from an old family of printers. His father Ernst Joseph Gregorius (1781 – 1816), who died soon after his son was born, owned a printer’s shop and a publishing house at Adlerstraße 6 in Berlin – on a street which has been built over in the 1930’s, where the former Reichsbank building (now, the Federal Foreign Office) stands today. After his death, Leopold Wilhelm Krause (before 1800 – 1846), a book printer bookseller from Berlin, who at the time was also the administrator for the Litfaß printing office and would later become Ernst Litfaß’s stepfather, took over and successfully ran the business. The business made good money printing pictorial broadsheets, travel books and playbills for the stages of Berlin.
Political and social commitment
During the Revolution of 1848, Litfaß, a self-confessed democrat, would publish and print political leaflets, posters and the satirical newspaper “Berliner Krakehler” [the rowdy Berliner], which was soon banned. When the revolution failed, his days as a grandiose democrat were over: Litfaß became a patriot and remained loyal to the king until the day he died. He would declare his loyalty on the monarch’s birthday, as well as print war dispatches during the Austro-Prussian War (1866) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71) for free. Even his social commitments were in line with the authorities: The festivities, concerts, fireworks and fundraising events organised by Litfaß mainly aimed to aid veterans, those wounded in the war and soldiers’ widows who were in need.
However, from the late 1840’s onwards, Ernst Litfaß invested all of his energy in the development of new advertising options, especially for posters. In 1849, for the occasion of the Berlin Industrial Exposition, he produced a giant poster, measuring around six by ten meters, a size not seen before in Germany before that time. His greatest success, however, was yet to come.
The emergence and triumph of the Litfaß advertising pillar
As in all big cities at the time, there was a problem with “wild” billposting in Berlin. Posters were being pasted everywhere: on walls, on fences, on trees, and when there was no more space available, they would quickly be pasted on top of each other. Old posters would come loose, flutter in the wind and blow away, thereby ruining the cityscape. In order to improve the situation, Litfaß came up with the idea of putting up advertising pillars on the busiest street corners and squares in Berlin. Posters were only meant to be pasted on those.He was most likely inspired to do so on one of his trips to London or Paris, where there were already precursors of the later Litfaß advertising pillars installed around the cities. He visited Paris at the turn of the year 1853/54, presumably with his friend, the circus director Ernst Renz. Ernst Litfaß was greatly impressed by the cosmopolitan city: “Everything is great in Paris”, he wrote in a travel report. He was raving about the powerful and effective advertising, the “giant advertisements” which the city also needed and noted:
„Comparing the shop windows in Paris to the local shops is like comparing the the Leipzig Trade Fair to the fair in Friesack […] Not only the street corners, pillars and fountains, no. The roofs and chimneys themselves are also painted and bear company names.”
What he does not describe are the “colonnes urinairs”, the small toilet facilities that have been located throughout Paris since 1839 and which, as a secondary function, had posters on the outside walls. Was Litfaß inspired by them? Perhaps.
In any case, the readers of the latest posters which had been posted on such early advertising mediums had to put up with bad smells. This experience may have been the decisive factor that led Litfaß to no longer consider urinals as advertising mediums. However, it’s a fact that there had already been early forms of what was to become the Litfaß advertising pillar in London from 1824 onwards. But it is obvious that the trip to Paris gave Litfaß the idea of an “annoncir pillar”, as, in the summer of 1854, he presented his plan to the Berlin chief of police, Karl Ludwig von Hinckeldey (1805 – 1856).
Courtly consecration for the “Pillar Saint“
As early as December 5th, 1854, an agreement was signed between the police headquarters and Litfaß, which granted Litfaß permission to install and use 150 “Annoncir pillars” for a period of 15 years. After that, ownership of the pillars was to be handed over to the police, as the new owners. At the same time, Litfaß was given the exclusive right to “charge a […] fee for each post that is posted on the pillars and urinals”.
Nevertheless, Litfaß’s near monopoly of poster advertising brought him more than just financial benefits. The half-jokingly, half-respectfully nicknamed “Pilar Saint“ was also held in high esteem socially. He was even appointed Royal Book Printer in 1863. When it was announced that the Siamese Twins would be appearing at the Renz Circus in 1869, Litfaß brought about yet another milestone in the history of the development of advertising in Germany, as their poster was the first one to ever be printed in colour in Berlin.
In order to accomplish that, he set up his own colour printing studio. In 1871, he celebrated the 25-year anniversary of his business.
Three years later, on 27th December 1874, Ernst Litfaß died suddenly while at a spa resort in Wiesbaden. His exact cause of death is unknown, but he had worked a lot throughout his life. He also lost five grandchildren between 1866 and 1872, a son-in-law and his beloved wife in 1873, and the innkeeper’s daughter Alexandrine Emilie Adelheid, née Wersig – which was a particularly heavy blow for the family man. The funeral took place on January 1st 1875, at the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery in Berlin.
His legacy
Ernst Litfaß’s estate came into the possession of the Märkisches Museum in 1925. Today, it is one of the Stadtmuseum Berlin‘s document collection’s most important assets. Ernst Litfaß probably put together the collection of his assets himself. The documents especially provide an insight into his business and social activities. His private life, however, is almost completely ignored.
Once bound together in a book, the collection of documents hasn’t withstood the passing of time. The spine of the book is missing completely, the binding is mostly untied and the edges of the pages are so brittle, that one or more connected pages had to be packed in folders in order to preserve them. Nevertheless, photocopies of the original pages allow the unique documents to be accessed for research purposes.
In addition, his estate includes a wide variety of individual documents, mainly playbills produced by the Litfaß printing shop, as well as concert programmes, excerpts from the “Theater-Zwischen-Akts-Zeitung“ newspaper and photographs. Ernst Litfaß is still present in the cityscape to this day: since 2006, at the site of the very first “Annoncir pillar” on Münzstrasse, a bronze advertising pillar commemorates the German advertising pioneer.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Deutschlandfunk
The Litfass Column – on the Occasion of its Abolition
A radio report by Ruth Johanna Benrath and Astrid Litfass