Vintage Poster Archives
Germany Wiedersehen 1955 | Hanns Lohrer Travel Poster
Germany Wiedersehen 1955 | Hanns Lohrer Travel Poster
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A Bollenhut-crowned girl sits reading a pale-blue letter inscribed 'Wiedersehen with Germany'. She wears the full Black Forest Tracht, puffed white blouse, deep plum floral skirt, embroidered bodice, against a flat yellow-green ground. The word GERMANY runs across the top in bold serif capitals. The composition reduces national tourism to a single, carefully chosen figure: not a landscape, not a monument, but a child in folk costume holding an invitation.
Designed by Hanns Lohrer (1912–1995), Stuttgart's foremost post-war commercial graphic designer, for the Deutsche Zentrale für Fremdenverkehr, Frankfurt, around 1955. The bottom imprint names both the printer (Maindruck Frankfurt) and the studio (Atelier Lohrer Stuttgart), making attribution unusually certain for a period when many German tourism commissions went uncredited. Lohrer was simultaneously shaping Porsche's visual identity during the 1950s and 1960s, and had won the inaugural Bund Deutscher Gebrauchsgraphiker poster prize in 1949. The Bollenhut, the straw headdress with fourteen scarlet wool pompoms worn by unmarried women in three Kinzig Valley villages, had become a symbol of the entire Black Forest region, its tourism profile boosted by the 1950 Heimat film Schwarzwaldmädel. Lohrer's choice of it as Germany's ambassador to foreign travellers was well-timed.
Reproduced using pigment-based archival inks on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper. The flat, smooth matte surface renders Lohrer's soft painterly illustration without added sheen, preserving the poster's gentle warmth of colour.
The poster draws collectors of mid-century German graphic design and those interested in the post-war West German tourism recovery. The yellow-green ground and red Bollenhut palette work equally well in a study, a hallway, or alongside folk-art collections.
