Post #350762 by bigbrotiki on Fri, Dec 21, 2007 12:27 PM

Wow! The stuff you dig up, Duke...
Why is that African warrior next to the camera wearing an American Indian head dress? :)
I wonder if the play set initially had little miniature toys to go with it...

Here is one of my favorite possessions, a 1936 Cigarette card collector's album about the German colonies, love the embossed cover design:

Germany tried its hand at being a colonial power kinda late, and from the late 1800s to the early 1900s had grabbed a couple of states in Africa and the South Seas. Of course, when Germany got its pee pee whacked after loosing WW1, that pie was cut up among the victors. This book bemoans that fact and idealizes the "glorious" chapter of German colonialism, very much in the nationalist spirit of the emerging Nazi party in the 1930s.

First, in accordance to this thread, some pages from the African colonies:

In the South Seas, we "owned" the territory of Micronesia, like Palau:

... and in Melanesia, the Bismarck archipelago:

Not to forget, in Polynesia, SAMOA:

These little color pictures came in your pack of cigarettes, and you could send in 1.- Reichsmark to get one of many themed albums that the different series fitted in as illustrations. This particular series had 270 cards to collect, and my album is complete. Here is the back of a card:

Never seen what a pack of "Eckstein Nr.5" cigarettes looks like, unfortunately, there are no ads in the album.

And last not least (from today's time), I found this postcard at the Capetown airport. This one's for you, Ernie! :D :

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2007-12-21 18:11 ]