Antique & Vintage Postcards

Captured in crisp real-photo silver gelatin just two years after the rubble of World War II still smoldered in Vienna's streets, this remarkable 1947 multiview card assembles eighteen landmark views of a city determinedly reclaiming its identity — the soaring Gothic needle of the Stephansdom at center, flanked by the baroque sweep of Schönbrunn, the grand arc of the Ringstrasse, the Riesenrad Ferris wheel still turning in the Prater, and the Rathaus glowing with civic pride. The purple postmark — "Wien, Rotundengelände, 13.9.47" — places this card at the Vienna Trade Fair grounds on 13 September 1947, a poignant moment of postwar reconstruction and Allied occupation. A penciled name, "Brun glea" (or similar), is the only personal trace left on this otherwise unaddressed card, making it a rare documentary artifact of Austria's fragile recovery.