"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.

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
Region: Western and Central Europe
Country: East Germany
Medium: Poster
Issuer type: Mixed
Regime: German Democratic Republic
Leader: Walter Ulbricht
Audience: Domestic public
Purpose: Mobilize or secure compliance
Themes: Labor, Economy and finance, Migration
Event: Berlin Crisis 1961
Techniques: Scapegoating Manufactured consensus
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]

English translation (machine translation by Claude, not verified by a fluent reader)

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.