"Grenzgänger zu bedienen ist unter unserer Würde": shop poster, Königs Wusterhausen district
A plain typeset notice: 'To serve border-crossers is beneath our dignity. They will only be served courteously again once they have taken up work in our republic.' It speaks in the first-person plural of the shop staff and names one bounded group, East Germans who worked in West Berlin, as the cause; the identical printed format is the tell.
Propaganda techniques used in this poster
- Date
- August 4, 1961
- Period
- Cold War
- Made by
- Sponsor not named on the poster; photographed and captioned by ADN-Zentralbild (GDR state news agency); posted in shops of Kreis Königs Wusterhausen
Full record
Region, Country, Medium, Issuer type, Regime, Leader, Audience, Purpose, Themes, Event, Source, Rights
- Region
- Western and Central Europe
- Country
- East Germany
- Medium
- Poster
- Issuer type
- Mixed
- Regime
- German Democratic Republic
- Leader
- Otto Grotewohl
- Audience
- Domestic public
- Purpose
- Mobilize or secure compliance
- Themes
- Labor, Economy and finance, Migration
- Event
- Berlin Crisis 1961
- Leader
- Otto Grotewohl
- Source
- Unidentified Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure
- Source
- Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), Bild 183-65208-0001, via Wikimedia Commons, retrieved September 29, 2026
- Rights
- CC BY-SA 3.0 DE (Bundesarchiv release on Wikimedia Commons; file page states the licence)
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-65208-0001 / CC-BY-SA 3.0 DE
Text on the object
Original (German) · read from the image, not independently checked
Grenzgänger zu bedienen ist unter unserer Würde Sie werden erst dann wieder zuvorkommend bedient, wenn sie eine Arbeit in unserer Republik aufgenommen haben [illegible printer's imprint line at bottom edge]
To serve border-crossers is beneath our dignity They will only be served courteously again once they have taken up work in our republic [illegible printer's imprint line at bottom edge]
Read from the committed 784 px image and matched against the German text quoted on the Commons file page.
