Echo Continental

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Nürburgring - opening race on June 18, 1927: Winner Rudolf Caracciola with co-driver in a Mercedes type S ;
Cover by Theo Matejko for Echo Continental
"The Prussian master Willy Guthschmidt driving art on the Berlin Schloßplatz ";
Dot-grid photograph from an Echo Continental from 1923
1930, in the midst of the global economic crisis : “Idyllic seaside resorts and glamorous beach life” are still the subject of “Echo” No. 215, issue B

Echo Continental was a customer and factory magazine published in Hanover for the tire and rubber goods manufacturer Continental AG . The monthly newspaper, which was designed by poster artists and illustrators from January 1913 to April 1941 , mainly provided information on high-profile sporting events, but also used comic figures and humorous stories for its own public relations work in its subscription magazine in addition to classic reporting .

History and description

As early as the beginning of the 20th century, the Continental Caoutchouc and Gutta Percha Compagnie operated a wide range of advertising strategies: In addition to posters, advertisements and advertising stamps , the company relied primarily on advertising materials that were useful for customers, such as maps , street atlases and travel guides . According to its motto “Semper prorsum, nunquam retrorsum!”, In German: “Always be useful, never persist!”, The company even donated some of the street signs, which were still rare at the time, under the continental director Siegmund Seligmann , who came from a Jewish family .

The rubber manufacturer wanted to supplement these PR tools with a customer magazine during the peacetime of the German Empire , which was supposed to only advertise its own product fields, but whose attractiveness was to turn interested parties into subscribers. For this purpose, the publisher and the editorial team - the paper was initially edited by Wilhelm Holtzheuer - placed "particularly great value" on the front pages, some of which were created by "outstanding talents from their own staff" or for the "pearls of the freelance art scene “Were committed. The front pages designed by the graphic and poster artists reflected the respective contemporary art movements from late Art Nouveau to Expressionism and Art Deco to New Objectivity .

Inside, the readers were informed with classic sports reports from the fields of cycling , tennis and football as well as automobile and early airplane races. Here too, for example, the legendary backhand of William “Big Bill” Tilden was artfully staged, but Roald Amundsen's flight to the North Pole and Elly Beinhorn's equatorial baptism were also illustrated. The artists were largely free to design their works; only the Conti logo and the typography were given - at least initially.

While the “Echo” started in 1913 with an initial edition of 30,000 copies, the number of printed issues had hardly doubled a year later. In the 1920s to the early 1930s, well over 100,000 copies often left the printing presses. The subscription price for 12 issues was temporarily 2.40 marks a year; “Proven motorists and motorcyclists” could, however, order a free annual subscription and have the booklets sent to them postage-free.

After the First World War in particular , Continental-Gummi-Werke also “used humor to serve their advertising”, as Echo editor-in-chief Karl Wigo Wiegand , who worked from 1919 to 1921, put it. After the reader initially with "charming jokes and parodies in comic were entertained style", they could in 1922 traveling with a fictional character around the world from the end of the year: The fat captain Priemke drove example of Melanesia , a local tribe "wild native “First to supply them with tennis balls from Continental AG, to get Chief Okuhahayn on board and then to travel with him across Germany in booklets - always with the simultaneous promotion of Conti's own rubber products.

The writer Erich Maria Remarque , probably as a freelancer from mid-1921, presumably as a permanent employee from April 1922 and editor-in-chief in June 1923, created the paper's two comic stars in 1923: The always cheerful "Contibuben" led as rogue apprentices as serial heroes always new pranks, portrayed in rhymes by their creator, signed with Remarque's initials EMR and illustrated by the draftsman Hermann Schütz . Even after he switched to Scherl-Verlag in early 1925, Remarque continued writing his Contibuben verses until they were discontinued in December 1926.

After the seizure of power by the National Socialists also came the echo from the mid-1930s "under the influence of art dictatorship of the Nazi regime": As the middle of the Second World War in April 1941, the 228th and last edition appeared, was subscribed by Willy Müller Cover "A gloomy picture of German soldiers driving through a Yugoslav village on their BMW motorcycles with Continental tires ": The Balkan campaign had begun.

Other personalities

Echo Continental's illustrators and copywriters included its own employees and the "pearls of the freelance art scene" hired by Continental-Gummiwerke, such as Jupp Wiertz , who designed three Echo front pages from 1925 to 1930. Bernd Reuters created ten expressionist front pages between 1926 and 1932. Even Paul Kaufmann alias "Caspari," Ludwig "Lutz" Ehrenberg , Carlo Egler , Julius Ussy Engelhard , Kurt Heiligenstaedt , the newspaper cartoonist Theo Matejko , Carl Franz Bauer , Julius Ussy Engelhard and Willy Müller were among the illustrators. Otto Schendel , who has been with Continental since 1924, created the figure of "Mr. Conti", a cigar smoking tire with a face, arms and legs.

Web links

Commons : Echo Continental  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e f g h i j k l Fred Bergmann: Early advertising / Something new in the West ... , article including a subtitled picture gallery under the rubric one day on the Spiegel Online website on September 4, 2009, last accessed on February 4, 2018
  2. a b Compare the information in the catalog of the German National Library
  3. ^ Waldemar R. Röhrbein : Seligmann, Siegmund. In: Hannoversches Biographisches Lexikon . Pp. 331f., 332; ( online via google books )
  4. Joachim S. Heise: Education and guidance of consumers , in this: For company, God and fatherland. Company war magazines in the First World War. The example of Hanover (= Hanoverian Studies , Vol. 9), also dissertation 1999 at the University of Hanover, Hanover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung und Verlag, 2000, ISBN 978-3-7752-4959-1 , pp. 120-131; here: p. 125 and above; limited preview in Google Book search
  5. Eckart Sackmann : Otto Schendel . In: Eckart Sackmann (Ed.): Deutsche Comicforschung 2012 . comicplus +, Hildesheim 2011, ISBN 978-3-89474-218-8 , pp. 36-55.