An Aerogram From Berlin

Travel Stories: Evan Rail laments the slow demise of ready-to-mail aerograms

05.21.09 | 10:25 AM ET

Prague. Photo by Evan Rail

My train to Berlin was almost two hours late, which meant two things: first, that I had to reschedule my interview for the next morning, and second, that I didn’t have enough time after I arrived to do anything other than head across town to my friend’s WG, or Wohngemeinschaft, a squat-like commune in a massive, run-down building where I had claimed a bit of floor space for the night.

The next morning I awoke early, drank the dregs from a pot of coffee and ate two of the still-warm Schrippen rolls out of the paper bag that someone had left on the communal kitchen table, then packed up my things and caught the S-Bahn down to my meeting. Afterwards, I walked a couple of blocks up Prenzlauer Allee to the post office, thinking that I had enough time to buy an aerogram and write a letter from Berlin to a friend in California before catching the early train back to Prague.

Like many post offices in Germany, the small branch at the corner of Prenzlauer Allee and Marienburger Strasse seemed to focus on Deutsche Post’s banking business, rather than its mail service, though there was a small, well-stocked display of envelopes and other stationery next to the brochures for mortgages and savings accounts.

When it was my turn, the clerk shook her head.

“I haven’t seen one of those in a long time,” she said. “But there’s a bigger post office at Alexanderplatz. You could try there.”

It was a clear, sunny day whose bright skies belied a temperature just below freezing, and while I always enjoy walking around Berlin, I didn’t have time to get to all the way to Alex and back before my next train. But when I found a decent-size post office just off Kastanienallee, I got in line.

“We don’t do telegrams anymore,” the clerk said.

“No,” I said. “Not a telegram—an aerogram. It’s a single piece of paper. It has a stamp already on it. You write on it. You fold it up and seal it. It’s quick. It’s Luftpost.”

“You want to send an airmail letter?”

“No, but it’s similar. I want to send an aerogram.”

At this point our back-and-forth started to become a bit more aggressive: The clerk said she didn’t think they ever offered such a thing, to which I said they certainly used to offer such a thing, and that every other country in the world used to offer such a thing. She’d never heard of them. I told her I’d sent them from France, Switzerland, the United States, Hungary and, yes, even from Germany.

She shrugged her disinterest and went to the back. A moment later she returned, holding a catalogue listing all the services offered by Deutsche Post, one which I realized was depressingly thin. She pointed at the list.

“If we offered it, it would be in here.”

She was right. It wasn’t listed, as I found out later, because aerograms had been eingestellt—abandoned, ceased or stopped—by Deutsche Post as of Jan. 1, 2007. One of my favorite ways of staying in touch with friends was already extinct in one country.

Though Aerograms are obscure enough now to confuse even postal employees, it wasn’t always that way. First invented by a British postmaster in Iraq in 1933, aerograms—also called aerogrammes, sometimes referred to as air letters—became very popular during World War II, especially for soldiers and their families; special aerograms were even produced for writing to prisoners of war. The use of aerograms remained fairly constant throughout the next couple of decades. A photographer on Flickr has a wonderful story of finding the aerograms sent by his mother to his father during their temporary separation in 1955, while the family was in the process of emigrating to Australia.

“They were very popular when they came out because they were much cheaper than sending an ordinary letter by air mail,” said Colin Baker, author of “Great Britain: The Development of the Aerogramme,” a monograph published by the Postal Stationery Society. “An ordinary letter by air mail was one and twopence and an aerogram was six pence, or less than half.”

In addition to being cheap, aerograms were fast, making them attractive for all kinds of situations. When I spoke to him on the phone, Mr. Baker recounted the story of one post-war international organization that sent out its newsletters by printing them on aerograms.

Commemorative versions have been issued for special events, like the one sold by the Jamaica Post Office in 1966 to commemorate the Eighth British Empire and Commonwealth Games. For the 400th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare in 1964, Britain’s Royal Mail issued one with a color photo of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre on the back. Recent versions from China have pictures of panda bears munching bamboo and panoramas of the Great Wall.

They’ve also been used in emergencies, even quite recently: after the tsunami of 2004, the Indonesian postal service, Pos Indonesia, distributed free aerograms and set up temporary post offices in refugee camps, allowing separated family members and friends to maintain contact despite a critical lack of infrastructure.

And yet despite all that, aerograms appear to be on their way out. Germany hasn’t had them for more than two years. And though the U.S. Postal Service still sells its pale-blue aerograms for 60 cents today, according to the journal of the American Air Mail Society, they’re not planning to print any more once the current batch is gone.

Around the world, most mail is monochrome. You might get the occasional manila envelope, and in some countries brown paper packages are still tied up with string, but the general color of postal mail is a dull range from white to beige.

An aerogram, by contrast, is usually pastel blue, and it stands out among the bills and junk mail like a robin’s egg among dun twigs. Many of the commemorative and holiday aerograms have brilliant illustrations. Some are straight-up beautiful.

Of course, the look of an aerogram is far from its only appeal. When you buy an aerogram it is already postage-paid, so you never need to search for a stamp. Nor do you have to look for an envelope: according to the regulations in the Universal Postal Union’s Letter Post Manual of 2005, when folded an aerogram must be between a maximum of 110 by 220 millimeters and a minimum of 90 by 140 millimeters, between a card envelope and a business envelope in size, and at that point the aerogram actually creates its own packaging which you then seal by fixing the gummed flaps at the edges. Though it’s only a single sheet of paper, an aerogram functions like a complete set of stationery.

With an aerogram, another advantage is that you don’t have to be terribly brief. If all you want to say is “wish you were here,” scratch it on a postcard and start hunting around for a stamp. But if you really want to say something important, an aerogram gives you a full page; seasoned users also know that they can fit an extra third of a page or more on the part that is folded inside. Unlike a postcard, an aerogram gives you enough room to communicate something longer, broader and deeper than a single thought. You can tell someone off with an aerogram, or tell them just how much they mean to you. With an aerogram, you can tell someone about the bizarre dream in which they made an appearance, or tell them what you saw on the dock when you got off the ferry and started looking for a hostel.

I always have several blueys on my desk as ready stationery, and there’s usually one or two at the back of my notebook or somewhere in my book bag. When I travel, I usually pick up a few at the first post office I find, and then fill out letters while waiting in airports or train stations. And yes, I’m aware that there are wonderfully immediate types of communication available in the form of email, IM and social-networking sites. Those are great for certain things. But there are many advantages to dead-tree messages. Unlike an electronic message, writing an aerogram is an incredibly tactile way to communicate. In reading it, not only are you holding something that your correspondent also once held, but you are allowing your eyes to be guided by the curves and lines that person created—where the writer’s hand once dipped and swept, the reader’s eye then follows. Handwritten communication between two people is as intimate as a dance or an embrace. You don’t get anything close to that from Helvetica. 

A week or so after I got back to Prague, I walked over to the main post office a few doors down from the childhood home of little René Rilke—later the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke—and just half a block up from the hustle on Wenceslas Square. I crossed under the main hall’s sprawling, Art-Nouveau frescoes and got in line at the small window for stamp collectors.

Ahead of me, two grandfatherly old men in communist-era corduroy caps and parkas were buying new issues and commemorative postcards for their collections. When it was my turn, I asked if they still had any aerograms.

“I haven’t seen one of those around in a while,” the woman said. She called over to a colleague at a different window and asked if she had any. I couldn’t make out the response.

“How many did you want?” the woman asked.

I told her I needed at least four. In the end they could only find three, one of which was slightly ripped.

I bought them all.


Evan Rail


11 Comments for An Aerogram From Berlin

Julia Ross 05.21.09 | 10:50 AM ET

Really enjoyed this, Evan. had no idea they were near extinct !

Daniel 05.21.09 | 11:03 AM ET

Just the other day, I couldn’t find any steamship to cross the Atlantic - another great service that seems to have ceased… :)

pam 05.21.09 | 11:34 AM ET

Thanks so much for this Evan. I still have a few Israeli aerograms kicking around here somewhere, when I lived there it was how I sent my letters back home. It makes me sad to hear that they’re endangered—I loved writing them and I loved receiving them, more than a postcard, distinctively air mail from far away, a perfect piece of postage. Insert nostalgic sighing here.

Joanna Kakissis 05.21.09 | 11:35 AM ET

Evan rules! What an outstanding piece, especially the tactile evocation of handwriting (like an embrace).

Evan Rail 05.21.09 | 12:27 PM ET

Hey guys, thanks for the kind words — glad you liked the story. Daniel, thanks for making me laugh nearly to the point of a spit-take. I suppose people have been complaining about the old ways going away for exactly as long as there have been people, but I still think postcards, letters and aerograms are worth keeping. Try drawing a picture the next time you send a text message and maybe you’ll see what I mean.

An update: last month I spent 10 days at Lake Balaton and in Budapest. Just like I normally do, I went to the first post office I saw and tried to buy aerograms. Nope — I was told they’re not available in Hungary anymore, either.

Kevin Evans 05.22.09 | 12:34 PM ET

Evan, I sense a new collector’s item in the making: extinct aerograms from around the world. I wonder if there’s already a market on eBay….

My dad used to send me aerograms when he was stationed in Korea when I was a kid. I too lament their passing….*Sigh*.

Hey Daniel, we actually sent some writers on a ship across the Atlantic (it wasn’t a steam ship, but they went first class, drank martinis every night and played at being Bond babes. You can read their story here http://www.thetraveleditor.com/readabout/Travel_Diaries/).

Susan 05.23.09 | 9:22 AM ET

I just recently came across a few blank aerogrammes and some I had mailed to my parents when I spent a summer in Spain back in the 70’s.  So sad that they are all but gone.  They were the perfect way to send long letters home with all my adventures.  The smaller you write, the more you can say.  I think my parents may have needed magnifying glasses to read some of mine.  I think we’ve gotten very good at quick communication and losing touch with each other at the same time.  Thanks for a reminder of some very special times in my life.

JN 05.23.09 | 8:02 PM ET

Beautiful story! I’m glad there are still some countries that have aerograms!

Niamh 05.24.09 | 7:10 AM ET

Great story. I miss sending and getting mail - aerogrames, letters and postcards. Scrolling down an email on the screen just doesn’t cut it , and no matter how small your laptop is , it just isn’t comfortable for curling up with a coffee on the sofa. I’m only in my mid-30s but sometimes it feels like my earlier travel experiences happened in another era completely.

manos misodoulakis 05.25.09 | 8:12 PM ET

I realy thank you for this post, and I agree with Niamh is a great story.

Knut Albert Solem 05.29.09 | 4:31 AM ET

Thanks for a lovely story!

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