Radio as a luxury good: Students design poster show

There have been regular public radio broadcasts in Germany since 29 October 1923, when the "Funk-Stunde Berlin" began broadcasting. How was radio advertised in its early days, in the 1920s and 1930s? And what does this advertising say about the status of radio at the time?

A new poster presentation at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg (GNM), designed by teacher training students at the University of Würzburg, explores this question. It was created in the winter semester 2025/26 in the history didactics seminar "The Poster" under the direction of Dr Miriam Montag-Erlwein. The cooperation partner was the Graphic Collection of the GNM with its director Dr Christian Rümelin.

First an excursion to the museum

The seminar kicked off in November 2025 with a visit to the Graphic Collection with its around 20,000 posters. There, the students analysed historical originals from advertising, photography and consumer culture. The excursion also served as an opportunity to familiarise themselves with the future presentation location directly next to the museum's study hall and to discuss design options.

The museum provided the general theme: Radio advertising posters. On site, the students selected potential objects and explained their decisions to Dr Rümelin. They then developed a complete presentation concept - from the hanging to the number of information panels to the thematic grouping.

Historical advertising posters catalogued

As many of the posters had hardly been researched before, the students first had to analyse them scientifically. Each person took two posters, analysed and interpreted them and wrote the accompanying texts for the presentation. All of the selected objects were also prepared by the GNM's conservation department.

"Radio as a luxury good in the 1920s and 1930s": this is the title of a presentation with twelve advertising posters that visualises four thematic perspectives:

• The radio as a design object
  Advertising posters from the Hornyphon and Minerva companies show radios as elegant Art Deco design pieces.
• The radio as a gateway to the world
  Advertising from the 1930s focuses on shortwave receivers - devices from Minerva and Ingelen that could receive transmissions far beyond Europe.
• The radio as a sign of technical progress
  A series of Telefunken posters from 1937 links radios with other technical achievements of the time such as trains, aeroplanes, steamships and zeppelins.
• The radio as a sonorous entertainment object
  Brands such as His Master's Voice, Hornyphon and Berliner Standard visualise sound and entertainment as a central sales argument.

Presentation on display until the end of July

The poster presentation can be seen from now until the end of July 2026 in the corridor next to the Study Hall of the GNM's Graphic Arts Collection. It is aimed at all visitors to the museum.