When my friends Bob and Barry got married, as soon as such a thing became possible, I said, first, “Congratulations,” and then, “Your getting married feels to me like the most normal thing in the world, but I’m still waiting for the Hallmark Corporation to print a greeting card that I can buy in any drugstore in America and send to wish you well.” Seven or eight years later, I should really check to see if my neighborhood drugstore’s greeting card section is now subdivided into “Weddings, M/F,” “Weddings, M/M” and “Weddings, F/F.” Somehow, I don’t expect it.

Michael Warner, in Publics and Counterpublics, has this to say about print and publicness:

Now consider the greeting card lineup in your local supermarket, or the postcards for sale at the nearby bus station, museum, sacristy, ACLU branch office or ironic-goods store. What’s for sale, and who might you send it to?

A card is a little piece of the public imaginary that I appropriate twice over, once by buying it, a second time by inscribing it and sending it. It is formatted and presented in anticipation of certain uses, which I can activate (thus becoming a member of its public) or subvert (becoming a member of its counterpublic). The postcard is issued with the tacit claim that something (the thing depicted on the picture side) is noteworthy-- a claim that several volumes of Boring Postcards now chronicle in its repeated failure. Whoever mails a postcard literally endorses, or seems to endorse (for sarcasm is always possible), in any case registers, the claim.

Before any of this can happen, somebody has to decide to put the thing into circulation. They (the anonymous, world-mastering they described previously in this space by C Bush) have to decide to engage a press, card stock, ink, and shelf space on the chance that people are going to want to invest a little of themselves, fifty cents and their immortal souls perhaps, in a still from Bunuel’s Andalusian Dog, an image of the bronze sword of Gou Jian, a view of the monastery Sopocani outside Novi Pazar, or Rembrandt’s pencil sketch of his second wife.

The postcard is a piece (literally a piece) of print culture that we historians of the book, the newspaper, the magazine or the poster too easily forget. A greater share of the public imaginary than we usually think about might have been vehicled by the postcard in the days before television, movies and radio. Michael Warner points out that our idea of the public sphere is tilted toward those activities that count as “rational-critical debate,” as deliberative conversation (114-117); and that those uses of communication don't begin to account for what can go on in a public. Thus, the mute gesture of locating and buying a postcard is already an act that postulates and characterizes a path of address, and its engagement with possible co-participants can mainly happen on the picture side of the card.

The “Neue Photographische Gesellschaft,” a now forgotten Berlin industry, proudly claimed at its founding in 1894 that, by reason of technological advances it had pioneered, each of its postcards was a photographic original. If this were true in any way but the highly technical sense in which an “original” relates to a negative in photographic printing, the NPG would have conjoined the magic of mass production with the immediacy of origins, and that ambition seems to have led some of their current-events series, in which parades, royal weddings and the like were printed up as postcards and put on sale within hours of their occurrence, presumably to be bought by some of the people who had attended the event but didn't own a Kodak. Thus the postcard steals some of the space that had been occupied by the newspaper and the broadside, and that would later be occupied by television. The postcard's reputation for timeliness is underlined by the cards dated July 31, 1914, with Kaiser Wilhelm's portrait and addressed “To My People,” predicting a war forced on Germany by unspecified enemies; the mobilization was called off the following day. (Alas, the next week the Kaiser called the calling-off off.)

Along with the obvious public events of wars and royal weddings, famous buildings and typical scenes, there were a batch of cards for publicly recognized holidays or occasions: the confirmation, the first communion (Protestants and Catholics attained visibility in Wilhelmine Berlin, but not, as far as I could see from this exhibit, Jews: no bar mitzvah cards), the first day of school, Christmas, New Year's Day, April Fool's, one's nameday. A little fellow in lederhosen says “Grüß Gott!” for whatever occasion calls for Bavarian local color. You can reconstruct the looming climate of expectation in which it is no longer sending a card for Martinmas, or whatever, that is notable, but the failure to send one. This was the wave on which the NPG rode high, for as long as it rode.

In a hugely successful series, women's faces appear superimposed on smoke clouds and bubbles (subtext: I'm thinking of you). Harder to place in an imaginary context are the many cards depicting women as lotuses floating on a lake, or as head-and-shoulder sproutings out of various vegetables (cabbages, rutabagas, and unforgettably, slender flapper asparagus stalks). To whom would one send such a card? To a woman, if one were a man? To another man, as if to say, “Women, you know... what lotuses, what cabbages, what rutabagas they can be!” Dr. Freud had plenty of work to do in those great years for public fantasy, ca. 1894-1939, the years of the NPG's activity. Clearly, these were the publicly avowable sexual fantasies; other companies, I guess, produced the racier kinds of card that you might not even dare send through the mail, if such were produced in Wilhelmine Berlin. I couldn't quite tell if the women in the fantasy cards were supposed to represent themselves, or Woman generally-- if this is a possible distinction. And similarly, for the many scenes of a man and woman kissing, I can't quite be sure if the message was “Somebody specific is kissing somebody specific, and I thought this was noteworthy,” or “Somebody (for example me) is kissing somebody (for example you).” Or was it “I send you this picture to make you see that people do indeed kiss each other on a postcard for sale, in the most public place imaginable, and this is meant to give my private thoughts an irreversibly public turn”? Some of these kissing photos featured chicken costumes. When did those cards come into fashion, and when did they begin to yellow and curl up on the rack, unsold and unaddressable?

Neither a book nor a letter, a piece of the public imaginary that gets much of its solidarity from the fact that it was produced in confident anticipation of a ready-made market (somebody please look up the sales figures for the chicken costume cards), a postcard says, “Out of the many possibilities, I chose this one”-- one out of the many, not one of the infinite possibilities latent in the blank page. (Then again, if confronted with a blank page we are all too apt to blurt out something that belongs to the many ready-made possibilities and doesn't live up to the infinite potential and responsibility of the tabula rasa.)

There's something Frankfurtish that wants to be said here, and I'll say it, quoting Warner who quotes Adorno: “Adorno imples, with pathos, that people rely on expressions that are precertified for them as common currency out of a kind of defensiveness; they are alienated from the labor of judgment” (135). And there's something cultural-studies-like that swings back with the pendulum, the idea that people who appropriate commodified postcards or greeting cards are nonetheless making their path through the city of available goods. Somebody I know recently threw a tantrum when I sent her some postcards-- a mass-produced object being apparently not special enough for her. And as an annoying teenager, I once twitted a friend for sending his mother a “store-bought sentiment.” (I've apologized.) Predictable, embarrassingly predictable gestures of the would-be confronters of the blank page.

Berlin around 1900 had its public monuments and its royal weddings. It also had thousands of sleazy beer joints, small kids with their pants split down the rear (saves on diaper costs), fat and frowzy women lumbering between the beer joints and the kids in the street, homemade circus spectacles in the back courtyards of buildings with poor drainage, and opportunities for sketched satire, both allegorical and naturalistic, and these were the daily material of Heinrich Zille, a mostly self-educated cartoonist whose views of the low life turned him into a commercial brand with which movies or cigarettes could be identified. Zille had a quick hand for gesture and a set of graphic abbreviations-- the nose as a blob, the cheeks or the belly as a couple of curves-- that turned a scene into “a Zille.” A readily-recognized style, a means of self-recognition among Berliners: here starts a path that goes from counter-public to public, and led, for Zille, to a controversial entry into the Academy of Fine Arts. His photographs, to this eye at least, are more evocative than his drawings, maybe because they were never intended to be anything but preparatory records for making “Zilles.” In other words, not addressed to anybody-- which is something noteworthy, when you've attained a style and fame that make it all too easy to turn out drawings that instantly and automatically have their public, their address, and their author-function.

Between the NPG, with its collective authorship and pride in technological reproduction, and the handicraft of the sharp-eyed old character Zille (who worked from 1877 to 1907 as a technician at another postcard factory in Berlin, the Photographische Gesellschaft), stretches a terrain of fantasy and exchange only tangentially related to print, but recognizable as a public sphere: the marketplace of images made to be sent to other people.