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Lilia Uzlowa
These aspects are complemented with the context of the message, which
often answers one or more of these questions.
The birth of mass tourism at the end of the 1960s to the 1980s means
a peak in the spreading of landscape-postcards. This dependence, mass-tourism
und spreading of landscape-postcards, which has gone through some metamor¬
phoses, is still alive today.'* The tradition of sending postcards with greetings
and impressions from the visited places, holidays, or travel, has been preserved
as a fashion, an expression of good taste and behaviour. “The distant and the
other”, positively or negatively filtrated through the personal experience, are
related through the messages with the familiar and the experience of everyday
life. In this case, it is not only a gesture of attention to relatives and friends, but
a spontaneous documentation of different expressions, identities, and cultural
models. The functions of the postcard change and become “individualized”.
The postcard’s “privatization” becomes stronger and gradually leads to a dif¬
ferentiation of its functions, tending to messages of a more intimate, that is
familiar nature (Lecerc 1986: 5).
It is logical that the type and genre variety of the motifs is consistent with
the needs of the market. The product should respond to the demand. In ad¬
dition to the mentioned postcards with images of famous and exotic places
there are those sent on holidays and special private and public life events"? (Till
1983: 32, 46). Such are greeting cards for Christmas, Easter, birthdays, an¬
niversaries, engagements or weddings, childbirth, or condolences in the event
of death of a relative and so forth. The lifestyle—the holidays and the every¬
day life—determines the genre variety of the motifs in that group (Holzheid
2011: 15).'4 Sending of messages written on open postcards in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries is not particularly popular due to the intimacy of
the messages, the individual character of the correspondence and the nature
of the epistolary culture (Till 1983: 32, 46). Letter writing became an art,
a sophisticated pastime that can be compared with diary keeping. A culture of
secularism gradually embraced the postcard: “As a favourite epistolary tool, not
only as a document, the postcard becomes a literary fact. It is obvious that the
2 Tt should be noted that sending electronic cards and messages via the Internet is increasing, which
restricts to some extent the classic function of the postcard.
'5 As far as is known, greeting cards have existed ever since the beginning of the 17" century, when they
were sent in bulk quantities in sealed envelopes. Their manufacture then was manual, more difficult and
labour intensive, which makes them small pieces of art. Many of these old techniques like collages, ap¬
plications, pull-out mechanisms, and bending are still used today in the manufacture of unique postcards
or postcards produced in small numbers (Till 1983: 32, 46).
4 Original text: “Im Alltag versiert zu kommunizieren, bedeutete im ausgehenden 19. und beginnenden
20. Jahrhundert vor allem auch, die bürgerliche Maxime gepflegter Unterhaltung mit ihren inhaltlichen
und formalen Vorgaben für mündliche und schriftliche Formen zu befolgen und diese zur eigenen Persön¬
lichkeitsdarstellung in eloquenter Rede oder Briefform geschickt zu inszenieren.” See also Ettl 1984: 55.