Antique & Vintage Postcards

Photo postcard of the Sparkasse (savings bank) building at the corner of Werderstraße and Hagenstraße in Peine, Lower Saxony — a sturdy Wilhelmine brick edifice with corner turrets, ornate terracotta friezes, and rounded arched windows, two uniformed figures standing at the entrance and a Gothic Revival church spire visible down the street behind. Peine was a mid-sized industrial town in Lower Saxony, and civic buildings like this Sparkasse — solid, respectable, slightly grand — were the physical expression of late-19th-century German municipal pride. Published by Coltyp, one of Germany's photographic postcard printers of the Wilhelmine era.