Description

SIGNAL
Volume 6, Heft 5 (Issue 5) • Berlin • 1945
Publisher: Deutscher Verlag, Berlin SW 68, Kochstraße 12–26 • Editor-in-Chief: Dr. Giselher Wirsing • Deputy Editor: Hugo Moßlang • Frequency: Twice monthly •

Pages scanned: 40

Overview
This final wartime issue of Signal is devoted almost entirely to the fate and future of European youth, framing the question of post-war European identity against the twin threats of American mass consumerism and Soviet collectivism — making it arguably the most ideologically explicit and forward-looking number the magazine ever published.

Articles and Features

Was wird aus der Jugend? / What Will Become of Youth?
Author credit not stated (signed G.W. — attributed to editor Dr. Giselher Wirsing)
An editorial essay arguing that European youth, forged in war and free of bourgeois illusions, represents the continent’s last best hope for a unified, class-free future distinct from both the American ‘standardised man’ and the Soviet ‘mass man.’

Unter toten Fassaden / Behind Dead Facades
By Leutnant Benno Wundshammer; full-page introductory illustration by A. Paul Weber
A four-part fictional composite — Richard (German grenadier), Lotte (Luftwaffe signals auxiliary), Grigol (Georgian Caucasian volunteer), and Jean (French tank officer) — whose wartime lives converge in a cellar, dramatising the idea that shared suffering creates a pan-European solidarity that transcends enemy lines.

Botschafter zweier Welten / Ambassador of Two Worlds [Sven Hedin — Der Europäer / Sven Hedin — The European]
Author not stated; three watercolour sketches reproduced from the hand of Sven Hedin
A tribute to the 80-year-old Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, presenting him as the quintessential European whose Asiatic travels and political warnings about Soviet and Allied imperialism confirm the primacy of Western civilisational identity.

Was sind deine Aufgaben nach dem Kriege? / What Are Your Tasks After the War?
A four-page illustrated policy manifesto with an occupation-grid diagram, mapping eight post-war reconstruction problems — social welfare, health, raw materials, labour, law, economics, transport, and the European question — against every professional category in society.

Norm gegen Kultur? / Standard versus Culture?
Author not stated; references Berlin architect Professor Ernst Neufert
An architectural essay arguing that post-war standardised building using a 1.25-metre module (Neufert’s Bauordnungslehre) need not produce cultural monotony, illustrating six regionally styled houses all built to a single grid; six colour house-type plates accompany the text.

Schule für Meisterhände / School for Master Hands
A photo-reportage on one of Germany’s craft master-schools, housed in a medieval castle, where goldsmiths, potters, weavers, and enamel workers are trained by practising master-craftsmen rather than from textbooks.

Es geschieht, was geschehen kann / What Can Be Done, Is Being Done
A photo-report on a German children’s air-raid shelter (Kinderbunker) and an adjoining hospital-bunker housed in a former mine, showing dormitories, nursing care, and a surgery suite operating under bombing.

Das Vorbild / The Role Model
A brief profile of Oberstleutnant Henze, commander of a Volksgrenadier regiment, held up as an exemplary leader who — despite losing six ribs in the First World War and sustaining a severe neck wound at Stalingrad — inspires total devotion in his young officers.

“Welt — Wohin?” / “World — Whither?” [Die Alphas sind die besseren Menschen / The Alphas Are the Better People]
Signed C.C.
A commentary on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (rendered as Welt — Wohin? in German) that uses the novel’s Bokanovsky mass-production of humans as a warning against the Allied-Soviet alliance’s drive toward the standardised ‘mass man,’ counterpoising Goethe’s ideal of individual personality.

Das Göttliche in den UdSSR / The Divine in the USSR
A short satirical photo-item: German troops captured a Soviet sound-film titled ‘Aria from Fidelio by Beethoven,’ which proved on screening to consist entirely of close-up medical footage of a singer’s mouth, throat, and torso — presented as proof that Soviet culture reduces the divine to mere mechanism.

Ärzte der Zukunft / Doctors of the Future
Author not stated; colour photograph
A caption-driven spread showing wounded soldier-students and female medical students attending university clinic demonstrations in the sixth year of the war, framing continued medical education as an act of civilisational resilience.

Advertisements
p. 3 • Wanderer-Werke AG • Continental typewriters, adding and accounting machines
p. 3 • Siemens & Halske / Siemens-Schuckertwerke AG • Global telephone network (Weltfernsprechen)
p. 18 • No. 4711 Tosca • Tosca Eau de Cologne perfume
p. 23 • Ihagee Kamerawerk AG • Exakta precision cameras
p. 23 • BMW • Motorcycles (‘Zahllose Rennerfolge’ — racing victories)
p. 24 • Urania / Clemens Müller AG • Office and travel typewriters
p. 24 • Henkel & Cie. AG • Laundry and cleaning chemical products
p. 24 • Emil Busch AG / Duncker Optik • Optical instruments
p. 24 • Dralle • Birch hair-water, shaving cream, lavender soap
p. 30 • Mercedes Büromaschinen-Werke AG • Office typewriters and calculating machines
p. 30 • Zeiss Ikon AG • Cameras, film, projectors, and scientific instruments
p. 32 • Lohse Uralt Lavendel • Lavender toilet water
p. 32 • Chlorodont • Dental hygiene / toothpaste
p. 36 • Felina / Alex Kamp & Co. KG • Brassieres and foundation garments
p. 36 • Alex Kamp & Co. KG (Silberhals Ballkönigin) • Kamp perfume

Color Plates Summary
• Front cover (p. 1) — Satirical illustration: tailors’ dummies labelled USA (suit with top hat), USSR (hammer-and-sickle badge); teaser text asks ‘Die Zukunft der europäischen Jugend?’ Bold, vividly coloured political caricature. MOST DRAMATIC/UNUSUAL PLATE: this cover is the most striking image in the issue — the only colour cover and a pointed allegorical attack on both American and Soviet models of humanity.
• pp. 2–3 spread (Das Vorbild) — Full-bleed colour photograph of Oberstleutnant Henze and two junior officers in Wehrmacht field-grey, set against a snow-covered winter landscape; Knight’s Cross visible.
• p. 19 (Ärzte der Zukunft) — Full-page colour photograph, overhead view of a hospital lecture-theatre with wounded soldier-students in grey uniform and female students in civilian dress attending a clinical demonstration by a white-coated professor.
• p. 20 — Full-page close-up colour photograph of two German soldier-students in laboratory coats conducting chemistry experiments; vivid blue, purple, and amber reagent bottles on the bench.
• p. 21 — Full-page colour portrait photograph of a young female medical student preparing a bacteriological slide specimen under microscope; warm-toned studio lighting.
• p. 22 (Die Geheimnisse Asiens) — Three colour watercolour sketches by Sven Hedin: (top) Shigatse Dzong fortress, Tibet, 1925; (centre) Mana-Sarovar, the sacred Hindu lake with snow peak reflected; (bottom) silhouette of a doomed caravan at dusk in the Turkestan desert.
• p. 35 (Norm gegen Kultur — Sechs Häuser) — Full-page colour graphic: six axonometric house illustrations in red, white, and black, showing central European (1), western European (2), south-eastern European (3), Mediterranean (4), northern European (5), and individual-style (6) homes all built on the 1.25 m Neufert grid.
• p. 39 (Welt — Wohin? / Huxley illustration) — Full-page surrealist oil painting: a foetus in a glowing amber retort-flask on a mechanised assembly line in a red-drenched hall; hands adjust chemical feeds — an illustration of Huxley’s Bokanovsky mass-human-production process.
• Back cover (p. 40) — Colour photographic portrait of two young women (ages 18–20) in striped summer blouses reading a book together; caption reads ‘Zwischen 18 und 20’ (Between 18 and 20), presenting an aspirational vision of the young European woman of tomorrow.