Shall I now tell you an entirely different sort of swindle story, not directly related to stamp collecting? It’s one of the cleverest you could ever imagine. And it centers around a stamp collection, so maybe I’ll chance it. The story takes place in Wilhelmshaven in 1912. A well-to-do resident of the city sold his beautiful stamp collection, compiled over years of hard work, to a gentleman in Berlin for 17,000 marks and sent it cash-on-delivery. In the meantime the buyer had sent a crate, allegedly filled with books, to the man in Wilhelmshaven. Shortly afterwards he telegraphed to have this crate sent back to Berlin. Both crates arrived safely at the Berlin freight office. The swindler then succeeded in claiming the crate holding the stamp collection, without paying the cash due, by passing it off as the crate he himself had sent. The crate allegedly filled with books contained only scraps of paper, and the Berliner disappeared without a trace.
So much for postage stamp fraud insofar as the stamp collector is concerned. There is another, much greater entity with a vested interest in postage stamp fraud, and especially in counterfeit stamps: the post office. Each year the postal service sells roughly 6 billion stamps, that is, 6,000 million; worldwide, the total is 30 billion. This works out as people in Germany annually spending around 5 billion marks on stamps. Therefore, each year the postal service makes and sells 5,000 million marks worth of small paper money, if you will. Postage stamps can be thought of as small bank notes, as they’re used not only to send letters, but often for payments up to a certain amount. In fact, stamps differ from paper money in one single way: printing counterfeit ten-mark or 100-mark notes requires tremendous knowledge and skill, as well as expensive and complicated equipment; whereas reprinting postage stamps is extraordinarily simple, and the rougher the original print, the more difficult it is to distinguish it from a forgery. A few years ago it so happened that several German ten-pfennig stamps were declared counterfeit by some very experienced stamp collectors, while the Reichspost was of the opinion that they were genuine. The frequency of this kind of stamp forgery — why not call it “banknote counterfeiting,” as the law punishes it just as harshly — is hard to determine, because the postal service keeps an annual tally of the millions of marks it earns selling stamps, but doesn’t record the values of the many millions of stamps it postmarks each year. There are people who claim that the postal authorities lose hundreds of millions of marks annually through fraud. As mentioned, this can’t be confirmed, but if one considers that the post office can be bilked even more easily than through counterfeit stamps, that is, by cleanly removing a stamp’s postmark, there’s no reason to doubt this claim. Some even maintain that there is a predilection for certain types of swindle depending on the region. For example, large-scale printing forgery seems most prevalent in Southern Europe, while washing and cleaning stamps on a smaller scale is more popular in the North. I’m telling you all this because what these people are driving at concerns all stamp collectors. They want to abolish stamps and replace them with simple postmarks. You’ve probably all noticed that postmarks, not postage stamps, are already in use for bulk mail. Enemies of the postage stamp think this procedure should also be used for private mail, which would require the automation of mailboxes. There would be five-, eight-, fifteen-, and twenty-five-pfennig mailboxes and so on, a different box for each amount of postage demanded for a letter. For the mail slot to open, the sender would first need to insert the corresponding amount in coins. But this idea is still fresh and quite a few obstacles remain, especially the fact that the Universal Postal Union acknowledges only stamps, not postmarks. However, the age of mechanization and technology will most probably spell the end of the postage stamp. Those of you eager to prepare for this eventuality would be wise to think about how to put together a postmark collection. We can already see how postmarks are becoming more and more diverse and intricate, even showing advertisements with words and pictures, and to win over stamp collectors, the enemies of the postage stamp have promised that postmarks will be adorned with historical images, coats of arms, etc., just like before with stamps.
“Briefmarkenschwindel,” GS, 7.1, 195–200. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.
The precise date of broadcast for this text has not been determined. It was most likely written during the second half of 1930. A catalog, found in the Benjamin archive, of an exhibition entitled “Die Alt-Berliner Post” [The Mail in Old Berlin], which took place between May 23 and August 3, 1930, suggests the end of May as the earliest “Postage Stamp Swindles” could have been created.
Schiller-Lerg speculates that “Postage Stamp Swindles” might have been broadcast from Berlin on January 16, 1931, a date for which the Funkstunde announced an untitled broadcast by Benjamin (Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 165).
1 Benjamin refers to three stamp catalogs and reference works of the period: Senfs Illustriertes Briefmarken Journal, Michel Briefmarken Katalog, and Paul Kohls Briefmarken Handbuch.
2 The German mistakenly gives 1778 as the date here. The La Renotière collection, owned by Philipp Ferrari de la Renotière (1850–1917), was bolstered by his 1878 purchase of the one-cent stamp, “Black on Magenta” of British Guiana. This stamp was valued in 2014 at $20 million.
3 A work with this title by Paul Ohrt has not been found. Ohrt is the author of Handbuch aller bekannten Neudrucke [Handbook of All Known Reprints] (1906–1938).
CHAPTER 21. The Bootleggers
Bootleggers — we’ll hear a bit later about the literal meaning of this word. The radio gazette was right to add “or the American alcohol smugglers” to its program announcement, otherwise you would have had to ask your parents.1 They know what sort of people bootleggers are; they’ve recently read a lot about the infamous Jacques Diamond, the rich bootlegger who fled to Europe to escape his enemies, but was arrested in Cologne and shipped back to America. Perhaps the few adults who have wandered into this show for children are interested in such people, these smooth customers who are always on the run. And maybe they’re interested in something else, too, such as the question: Should children even hear these kinds of stories? Stories of swindlers and miscreants who break the law trying to make a pile of dough, and often succeed? It’s a legitimate question. It would weigh on my conscience if I were to sit here and fire off one tale of villainy after another without first saying a few words about the laws and grand intentions that create the backdrop for the stories in which alcohol smugglers are heroes.
I’m not sure if you’ve heard about the alcohol debate. But you’ve all seen a drunk person before, and just one look at such a creature is all it takes to understand why men came to ask themselves whether the state should prohibit the selling of alcohol. People in the United States did just that in 1920, by adding an amendment to the constitution. Ever since, what they call Prohibition has been in force, which means it’s illegal to provide alcohol without a medical purpose. How did this law come about? There are lots of reasons, and if you were to look into them, you would learn all sorts of important things about the Americans. On a December day 300 years ago the first European settlers, the ancestors of the white Americans, landed their small ship, the Mayflower, on the rocky shores of what is now called the state of Massachusetts, where the town of Plymouth lies. Today they are called the 100-percenters, referring to their unwavering convictions, their austerity, and the imperturbability of their religious and moral principles.2 These first immigrants belonged to the Puritan sect. Their effects are still clearly noticeable in America today. One of the traces of Christian Puritanism is Prohibition. The Americans call it the noble experiment. For many of them Prohibition is not only a matter of health and economy, but something downright religious. They call America “God’s Homeland” and say that the country is obligated to have this law. One of the law’s greatest proponents is Ford, the automobile king, but not because he would have been a Puritan. He explains: Prohibition allows me to sell my cars more cheaply. Why? The average worker used to spend a good part of his weekly wage in bars. Now that he can no longer drink his money away, he has to save. And, according to Ford, once the worker has begun to save, he will soon have enough for a car. Prohibition has multiplied my car sales, he says. And many American manufacturers think the way he does, not only because big American companies sell more as a result of Prohibition, but because the alcohol ban makes manufacturing cheaper as well. A worker who doesn’t drink is of course much more productive than one who does so regularly, even if he doesn’t drink much. Thus, over the same time period the same manpower produces more than before, even if this increase is very smalclass="underline" for a country’s economy, this tiny bit of improved efficiency among individuals is multiplied by the total number of workers and all their work hours over the course of ten years.