This label for a brandy and liquor manufacturer (August Strengert in the town of Sankt Johann on the Saar River) demonstrates the allure of global events and global politics, even in small-town Germany. The brandy label, created during the Second Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902, celebrates the Boers in their fight for independence. Diplomatic relations between Britain and Germany had been strained during this war, as both German nationalists and members of the broader German public supported the “courageous” Boers’ fight for independence from the world’s preeminent imperial power, Great Britain. Germany supported the Boer cause in part by selling German-made weapons to them, including Mauser rifles and Krupp cannon.
Commercial advertising in Germany that sought to tap into popular support for the Boers, or merely to tap into the excitement of a war in exotic Africa, tended to depict the Boers as solitary white frontiersmen, steadfast and resolute in their fight for freedom.
Source: WZB (1901), S. 215. Nr. 47731. Printed in: David Ciarlo, “Rasse konsumieren: Von der exotischen zur kolonialen Imagination in der Bildreklame des Wilhelminischen Kaiserreichs,“ in Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus, ed. Birthe Kundrus (New York: Campus, 2003), p. 162.
David Ciarlo, „Rasse konsumieren: Von der exotischen zur kolonialen Imagination in der Bildreklame des Wilhelminischen Kaiserreichs,“ in Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus, ed. Birthe Kundrus, New York: Campus, 2003.