Jungdeutschland Heilbronn — Stiftungsfest

A set of six advertising labels — Reklamemarken — printed for the Stiftungsfest, the foundation festival, of the Heilbronn local group of Jungdeutschland in May 1913. Each carries the same three-line caption, JUNGDEUTSCHLAND · ORTSGRUPPE HEILBRONN · STIFTUNGSFEST MAI 1913, with the printer's imprint C. Rembold, Heilbronn, in the lower margin.

Jungdeutschland was the Jungdeutschlandbund, the Young Germany League founded in 1911 as an umbrella for nationalist youth work; by 1914 it claimed to reach roughly a fifth of German youth. Its local groups drilled, marched and camped in a style borrowed directly from Scouting, and these labels show it: campfire cooking by day and by night, pitching a ridge tent, a march with a lute, a standard bearer, and a Scout with a spade framed by the arms of Heilbronn and Württemberg.

The Stadtarchiv Heilbronn holds an example of the set under signature E002-814 and notes that a further motif exists in black and white, so the printing may have run to more than the six designs held here.

These are cinderellas: no face value, no postal validity, no catalogue number. They belong to the same moment as the Stuttgart Scout exhibition labels of the following month.