Ernestine und Heinrich

Die PostKarten
Rudy Napp's PostCard Collection

The following are copies and translations of postcards written between 1901 and 1931 mainly by Ernst Napp and his wife Olga before their marriage. I became interested in creating this collection upon reading some of these cards, and discovering that Ernst’s sister, Martha, (my paternal grandmother) had also written some of them. Doing these translations also turned out to be a lot of fun. My mother, who is the person who actually wrote out these one hundred and forty seven postcards deserves the most credit, for she played a big part in their actual translation as well. We spent some time going over them, trying hard at first to retain word order so that we could keep some of the original flavour of the texts, but later on being forced to use colloquial equivalents in order to make any sense out of them whatsoever. They provided a lot of amusement, as Mom explains that many of the expressions used then, have not carried over into our day.

Where we had to use filler words and where we had to attach little notes to help the reader understand the meaning, I have written them enclosed in square brackets. The cards are numbered by their original order found in the postcard book owned by Rudy Napp, son of Ernst and Olga.

I hope the reader enjoys this little piece of Napp family history as much as we did in putting this collection together. The best thanks to Rudy who gave us the opportunity to do this by putting his book on long-term loan to us.

Monica, July 1991

When I first decided to put the collection on the web, I used the 20 year old photocopies from the book I had made. They weren't terribly lovely, and certainly didn't have the impact of the originals.

So I had asked Rudy's widow for permission to borrow them once more - this time to take a proper scan of them with 21st century equipment. I have to say they are a joy to look at and handle. I hope the scans do them justice. I have let the autofix on photoshop have its way with most of them - it did a pretty good job for restoring the images. I also decided that the autofix, while over-doing the sepia tones of the back of them, gave the writing a little more contrast, so I left it that way. The original writing is a little more subtle, making it more difficult to read.

When you go through the collection, you can see a much bigger version of the postcard or its reverse by clicking on the images in the page.

Hope you love them as much as I did....