Postcard Drachenfels on the Rhine, Max Wipperling Elberfeld, early interwar period

Postcard depicting the ruin of Burg Drachenfels on the Rhine in hand-coloured lithograph, published by Max Wipperling in Elberfeld under number 5465. The composition shows the medieval tower on the rocky summit of the Drachenfels against a sky of pastel pink and soft blue, with dense foliage in darker tones across the foreground. The caption reads "DER RHEIN. Ruine Drachenfels" in classical type. The card is printed on rough tinted board, unposted and in good condition, with slight discolouration at the edges and a fine crease in the upper right corner.

The Drachenfels near Konigswinter ranks among the most reproduced motifs of Rhine Romanticism, a touristic and literary tradition that reached its peak in the nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth. Lord Byron invoked the mountain in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and generations of travellers ascended the summit by means of the Drachenfelsbahn, the oldest rack railway still in operation in Germany, inaugurated in 1883. Max Wipperling, publisher at Elberfeld, belonged to a dense network of German postcard publishers who, in the early twentieth century, recorded the landscapes and monuments of the Rhineland in substantial print runs. The Elberfeld imprint places the card before 1929, the year in which the city was absorbed into present-day Wuppertal.