And so as the sun goes down on another week, this seemed to be a very suitable scene indeed.
What we are looking at has has several names. At one time it was the river Levensau, which was improved and extended from 1777 and renamed the Eider Canal. That was then upgraded and straightened from 1887 and called the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal, because he opened it in December 1894.
The canal is actually vitally important, because it links the North Sea to the Baltic Sea, but don`t look for it on a modern map, as it changed its name to the Kiel Canal in 1948.
As for the bridge, that keeps the old name alive, for it is the Levensau High Bridge, in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, and it was built in 1894, as the first bridge to cross the canal. Since then it has been widened, and frequently, because it had a major problem, being unable to be used by trains and cars at the same time, so they took it in turns. That strange situation lasted right until 1954, when for the first time trains, cars, and people could cross the bridge at the same time, though it did lead to the shortening of the original towers.
Today, there are two bridges, because the traffic even outgrew the 1950s modifications; the second, a four lane road for motorway traffic, opening beside ours in 1984. That left our bridge for just local traffic and the railway trains. Then it was decided the canal needed to be widened again, and our bridge would have to go. At first, in 2018, it was going to be entirely demolished and another bridge built in its place, but then it was discovered that there were sitting tenants, five thousand of them, in the old towers, the largest population of assorted bats anywhere in Europe, and, rather wonderfully, they were given the right to stay.
These cards were printed by Hollenbaum and Schmidt, of Berlin, North, and they were primarily poster printers, whose company began in 1909. During the First World War they were heavily involved in printing propaganda posters, but they seem to have become more peaceable in the Inter-War years, which is when these cards were issued. They never printed the Berliner Morgenpost, but they printed the first advertising poster for them as early as 1902.
I only seem to be able to find five cards in this set , which are :
- Suez-Kanal : 17 Marz - 23 Marz 1912
- Gotakanal (Schweden) : 24 Marz - 30 Marz 1912
- Kaiser Wilhelm Kanal : 31 Marz - 6 April 1912
- Panama-Kanal : 7 April - 13 April 1912
- Canalegrande (Venedig) : 14 April - 20 April 1912