Random Saturday - "Litfaßsäulen"

What are "Litfaßsäulen", I feel you think.
You may know them as advertising columns (or pillars), but maybe you don't have them in your area anymore or just haven't given them much thought.
In fact I have been walking by one every time on the way home from the bus, but I'm so used to it, I hadn't even been aware of it.
What brought the columns back to my mind actively was this tin. It used to hold gingerbread, a co-worker gave it to me for Christmas years ago. I put it with my Steiff animals because of the Steiff "poster". The mix of "advertisements" is a bit strange, but it's a pretty tin.
The picture in the center on the right is one of the Litfaßsäulen that still exist in town.

I have no idea what the highest number of Litfaßsäulen in town was, but not all of them still exist.
This is a bad picture (a cutout of an old postcard from around 1940) of one that isn't there anymore. Actually, the houses behind it aren't, either. You can just about see that the column has a pretty domed roof and some kind of pattern underneath.
The few I still know of in town today are very simple with flat concrete roofs and none of those in my area have any posters up at the moment.

Most advertisements are on billboards, old-fashioned ones, but of course also more and more digital ones. While the old column has become rare compared to old times, it's not gone completely, though.

Where did "Litfaßsäulen" come from and why the strange name?
They were invented in 1854 by a Berlin printer, Ernst Litfaß. His suggestion was to use them for advertising to avoid people putting advertisements and pamphlets just anywhere from walls to trees (and of course he wanted to make money with them). The city of Berlin granted Litfaß a monopoly until 1865 under the condition that news were also posted on the new columns (for free), and the first ones were put up in 1855.

Lithography by F. G. Nordmann, ca. 1855
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons 

The columns became so popular that the idea spread to other cities in Germany and also other countries, with designs such as the "colonne Morris" in France.
Some of them were not only used for advertising, but could/can also house public toilets, phone boxes, ticket machines, and even flower shops!

A little selection of "Litfaßsäulen"  (via Wikimedia Commons)
1. Flower shop in the street "Lange Reihe" in Hamburg (1975)
Picture by Norbirt, CC BY-SA 3.0 
2. Colonne Morris in Paris 1910. Picture by Eugène Atget, public domain
3. Concrete "Litfaßsäule" in Trostberg. Picture by LepoRello, CC BY-SA 3.0
4. "Litfaßsäule" in Vienna with a poster recognizing the cultural importance
over 170 years. Picture by Blausonorisch, CC BY-SA 4.0

In 2019, people in Berlin were shocked to hear that a big part of the existing 2,548 columns were about to be dismantled. One of the reasons given was the age and condition and concerns about possible asbestos in the concrete.
As I said above, you are so used to them that you don't really pay any attention, but to many the idea of them being gone felt like taking down history. There were protests and art installations. After determining the historical value, however, only 24 of them were chosen to be protected as historical monuments.
Maybe there wouldn't have been such an outcry if the new standardized columns didn't look so boring? I doubt they have the charm of this Art Nouveau example from 1901 in Karlsruhe.

No machine-readable author provided.
Ikar.us? (based on copyright claims),
CC BY 2.0 DE via Wikimedia Commons

Let's come to a famous column now, though. If you are a fan of classic movies, you may know this one, but do you also know that it wasn't real?
Of course I mean the column in "The Third Man". For those who don't know the movie - the American writer Holly Martins comes to post-WW II Vienna to meet his friend Harry Lime who has promised him a job. He learns that Harry has been killed in an accident, but one night he spots him in the street and follows him to a square - but Harry is gone.

The column is an entrance to Vienna's sewer system where the last chase after Harry takes place at the end.
Vienna still has four such columns, but the one in the movie never existed. The scene was filmed at the square Am Hof, but the only column you'll find there is a 17th century Marian column.

Picture by Gugerell, CC0
via Wikimedia Commons

I said to Martins: "Did you look inside the newspaper kiosk or was it locked?"
"Oh, it wasn't exactly a newspaper kiosk," he said. "It was one of those solid iron kiosks you see everywhere plastered with posters."
...
We stopped at the kiosk. "You see he passed behind here and simply vanished - into the ground."
"That was exactly where he did vanish to," I said.
"How do you mean?"
An ordinary passer-by would never have noticed that the kiosk had a door, and of course it had been dark when the man disappeared.
...
"It's one of the entrances to the main sewer."
(from the novel "The Third Man" by Graham Greene)

In the shot, the Marian column was hidden and the kiosk was just a prop.
I'm aware that this might be a bit of an anticlimax to the end of the post, I'm sorry. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoyed this little glimpse in the history of the "Litfaßsäule".


Sources and further reading:

1. Andrea Westhoff: Vor 165 Jahren - Die Geburtsstunde der Litfaßsäulen. On: Deutschlandfunk, December 5, 2019 (in German)
2. Andreas Becker: Streit um Litfaßsäulen-Austausch in Berlin: Säulenheilige verschwinden. On: Deutschlandfunk, July 25, 2019 (in German)
3. Kate Connolly: Last stand for Berlin's ageing concrete advertising pillars. On: The Guardian, March 31, 2019
4. "Litfaßsäule" on German Wikipedia