Keep calm and carry on

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Keep Calm and Carry On ( English , stay calm and keep going ') was a propaganda -Poster, the 1939 by the British was produced government. Since the poster was never published, it was relatively unknown until it was rediscovered in 2000; subsequently it gained great popularity.

The poster was originally printed by the Ministry of Information with a circulation of over 2,500,000 in order to raise the morale of the population in the event of a serious military strike. It was intended as the third part of a series after Freedom Is In Peril. Defend It With All Your Might and Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory , which had been distributed across the country.

The poster was rediscovered in a second-hand bookshop in Alnwick ( Northumberland , England) in 2000 . Because UK state publications' copyright ( Crown Copyright ) expires after 50 years, it is now in the public domain . It quickly became very popular not only as a poster, but also as an imprint on clothing, coffee mugs and numerous other items; The bookstore where the poster was rediscovered had sold 41,000 copies by 2009. The slogan has become a household word in Great Britain that appears in articles in numerous newspapers such as The Times , The Independent and The Guardian . The slogan has been used as a heading on the Economist website four times since 2011.

Due to its popularity, there are now numerous parodies that take over the design of the poster but change the text. Examples are Now Panic and Freak Out , Don't Panic and Fake a British Accent or Keep Calm and Have a Cupcake (with a cupcake instead of the crown). A mobile app with which you can create your own versions has already been sold 100,000 times, according to the provider.

literature

Bex Lewis (2017): Keep calm and carry on. The truth behind the poster. London, Imperial War Museums , 80 pages.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ One of only two surviving posters in the public domain ( en ) WarTimePosters.co.uk. Retrieved February 28, 2013.
  2. ↑ Chris Slack: Keep Calm and Carry On ... to the bank: Original wartime poster shows up on Antiques Roadshow (en) . In: Daily Mail . Retrieved February 28, 2013. 
  3. ↑ Stuart Hughes: The Greatest Motivational Poster Ever? (en) , BBC News . February 4, 2009. 
  4. ↑ Rees, Nigel : Cheer up, the worst is yet to come (en) . In: Today program , BBC Radio 4 , July 20, 2011. 
  5. ↑ David Newton: HMSO Crown copyright FOIA Request ( en ) In: Wikipedia-l . lists.Wikimedia.org. May 23, 2005. Retrieved February 28, 2013.
  6. ↑ Jon Henley: What Crisis? Keep Calm and Carry in: The Poster We Can't Stop Buying (en) . In: The Guardian , March 18, 2009. 
  7. ↑ a b Goll Ulrich: The art of war . In: the daily newspaper , taz, the daily newspaper Verlagsgenossenschaft eG. , November 6, 2012. Retrieved February 28, 2013. 
  8. ^ Rob Walker : Remixed Messages (en) . In: The New York Times Magazine , The New York Times Company , July 5, 2009. Retrieved February 28, 2013. 

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