Elbląg – Museum of Archaeology and History (Elbinger Zeitung)

This sign is on display at the Museum of Archaeology and History in Elbląg

Posts like this one are just my never ending supply of random material which is of peripheral interest at best, but it’s something that I think is intriguing about the history of a city. The sign in the photo was used at a location which supplied the Elbinger Zeitung or collected material for it, which was the German newspaper of the time about Elbing (or what is now Elbląg).

There are two reasons why this sign interested me, partly because it’s the end of a newspaper, suddenly brought to an end with a changing population, a changing country and a changing language. I’m assuming that the editorial staff would have all moved to Germany as part of the forced repatriation when Polish citizens were moved in, and that must have been a challenge for them given their entire careers had been writing about a city where they had to move away from.

Also, it’s one of thousands of signs in Elbląg that must have been torn down as they were replaced with Polish signage in the late 1940s. I’d quite like to know what happened to this sign, whether it was acquired soon after for a museum collection, whether it was found recently or whether an individual took it as a memento. So many questions…..