Be brief!

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Design in the 1930s in Fraktur for the Deutsche Reichsbahn
Subsequent design in a sans serif - Antiqua

Be brief! Often supplemented by the note be considerate of those waiting, was a request that was placed next to almost all public telephones or printed in telephone books in Germany from the 1930s to the 1970s - even longer in the GDR .

The enamel signs with red lettering, which were clearly placed next to the telephones, were considered necessary because there was no time interval for local calls . The conversation could therefore be extended at will after inserting the necessary amount into the payphone .

Since private telephone connections were still not widely used, telephone booths were often the only way for residents in the vicinity to make phone calls. In the days before cell phones became widespread, travelers relied on public telephones anyway. As a result, the telephones were mostly very busy. If users used the practically unlimited talk time for particularly long calls, long queues could quickly arise in front of the telephone booths. In order to counteract this, the Reichspost , Deutsche Bundespost and Deutsche Post (GDR) warned their customers to be disciplined with the conspicuous signs.

In West Germany, with the increasing number of private connections and the resulting lower use of public telephones, the request lost its meaning over the decades. Even before the German Federal Post Office introduced the clock for local calls on January 1, 1980 and thus abolished the unlimited duration of calls, the signs gradually disappeared from the telephone booths. In the 1980s, on the contrary, stickers on telephone booths advertised with the slogan “Call us!”. It is different in the GDR, where until recently only a minority of all households had their own telephone connection.

The request “be brief” is still commonly used today in popular parlance to remind someone to be brief.

literature

  • Michael Reuter: Telecommunications - From history into the future . Decker Verlag, 1990. ISBN 3-7685-0990-7
  • On the history of telephoning in the GDR: Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk , Arno Polzin (Ed.): Be brief! The opposition's cross-border telephone traffic in the 1980s and the Ministry of State Security . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-525-35115-4 .