Go hilft dein Geld Dir kampfen! (That's how your money helps you to fight!)

German post First World War political poster depicting a ship captain with his arm around a young German soldier, pointing out to sea at the smoking wreckage of a ship as it sinks beneath the water. The poster title, 'Go hilft dein Geld Dir kampfen! In U-Boote verwandelt, halt es Dir feindriche Granaten vom Leib! Darum: zeichne Kriegsanleihe!' translates as 'That's how your money helps you to fight! Transformed into submarines, it keeps off enemy grenades! That's why you should subscribe to war bonds!'. The poster provides a context for the social, cultural, emotional and political situations in Germany during and after the First World War. It also provides an insight into the way war was viewed and experienced by the German nation, and of German war propaganda and the chaotic period immediately following the first World War when a sruggle for the rights of the German people began between the radical Communists on the left and the strident anti-Bolsheviks on the right. In German posters during this period words and images were integrated and the essence of communication was conveyed through simplified images and powerful patterns. German posters often extoll an overt nationalism, strong expression of ancient Germanic spirit or symbolic imagery to address propoganda objectives. Lucien Bernhard (1883-1972) was born Emil Kahn and later became known as Lucien Bernhard. He was a designer and worked in Berlin from 1905-1923 and then in America from 1923 until his death in 1972. Essentially self-taught, he received some instruction at the Akademie der Kunst in Munich. In 1905 he won a poster design competition for Priester matches, launching his career. Bernhardwas a master of lettering, and his typefaces were produced commercially. The majority of his First World War posters, for war loans and charities, were purely typographical. His 1913 Franktur typeface, a revival of the Gothic script of the Middle Ages, asserted a defiantly German identity. In 1920 Bernhard was appointed First Professor of Poster Design at the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin. He left after three years for New York, where he designed further typefaces and advertising posters and developed corporate identity programmes. After the Second World War Bernhard moved away from advertising and concentrated on painting.

Presented through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program 2006