The Imagery of Postcards sold in Micronesia during the German Colonial Period

Abstract

The first picture postcards of Micronesia were produced for the German colonies. Starting in 1898, cards existed for the Marshall Islands, soon followed by cards for Pohnpei, Yap, Palau and the Marianas. In total three main series can be identified: generic lithographed cards with reproductions of drawing or paintings, early photographic cards with undi-vided backs and white space on the image side for messages, and full-face image cards. The motifs on the early cards are scenic and ethnographic, while those on the second and third series predominately reproduce symbols of German colo-nial power and achievement. Cards that are exploitative of women (along the lines of ‘dusky maidens’), which were so popular in Samoa, are very rare in the German Micronesian setting. In modern marketing, visual imagery is a pow-erful component to attract the attention and imagination of potential visitors. There is a perpetual cycle of reinforcement, where post-cards and other imagery—today travel bro-chures, in the past textual descriptions or paint-ings/etchings — provide a representation of key attractions which already have or are in the process of attaining icon status; these induce tourists to visit these sites and then to reinforce the icon status by replicating the messages through postcards, taking their own photos, textual descriptions (in travelogues and today as blogs on the world wide web). This paper will be concerned with the rep-resentation of Micronesia on postcards pub-lished during the German colonial period (1886–1914). So far, only little work has been carried out on the imagery of Micronesia in general and on the imagery of the colonial periods in particu-lar. The standard work on Pacific imagery, European Vision and the South Pacific,1 does not