Cigarette Card Information

A Brief History of German Cards

Cigarette card collecting is almost unknown in Germany nowadays. Yet until the second world war, the Germans had a long tradition of collecting cigarette and trading cards. Even after the war, cigarette cards made a brief comeback, both in East and West Germany. However it was not on anything like the previous scale, and eventually they were banned in West Germany in 1955.

Before the first world war, cards were generally trading cards, with cigarette cards being few and far between. Actually the first pictures were not cards at all but rather were printed on the packaging. Stollwerk, a chocolate manufacturer in Cologne, was the first German company to put pictures on its products in 1840. Later, around 1860, the first "Picture and Photograph Chocolate" appeared, with pictures of portraits, buildings and landscapes printed on the wrapping. One series for example showed the building of Cologne cathedral. Various other series followed. However very few of these early pictures survive.

In 1872 the Liebig company issued the first of its famous "Reklamebilder" (Advertising pictures). These were large format pictures, given away with the products. To stay ahead, Stollwerk produced high-quality pictures, often printed in a 12-colour process with competitions for original pictures which had prizes of up to 1000 Reichsmarks. In 1895 Stollwerk produced the first albums for collecting the pictures, which included explanatory text after 1897. The idea of collecting cards gradually caught on, and by the turn of the century, virtually every German product included collectable pictures. Cigarettes however were the exception. Until the first world war smoking was a luxury past time. If men smoked at all it was usually cigars or a pipe and woman generally didn’t smoke at all, at least not in public. Few cigarette cards are known from the time before 1920. Only a handful of sets are listed in Koeberich’s catalogue, as well as a patriotic booklet issued by the German branch of Waldorf-Astoria. No dates are given for the cards although the booklet was probably issued in the Winter of 1917/1918.