Hans Sachs (poster collector)

Hans Sachs was a Berlin dentist whose greatest accomplishment came from his passion for posters. He was the leading founder of an important group devoted to collecting posters which started an influential poster magazine. Before the seizure of his collection of 12,500 posters during Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, he had the largest collection of posters in Germany, probably in the world. He was able to escape to the United States, but he never regained possession of the posters. After years of court battles, 4344 posters were returned to his son in 2013. Some will be given to museums, but most have been or will be sold at auction.

Hans Josef Sachs was born in Breslau, Germany, now Wrocław, Poland, on August 11, 1881. He began collecting posters when he was only 16, possibly inspired by a gift to his father of three life-size prints of Sarah Bernhardt signed by Alphonse Mucha. In 1903-4 he served a year in the army, and again for some months in 1914-15. He was educated as a chemist, receiving his doctorate in 1904 in chemistry, physics, and mathematics; and then another in dentistry. He then interned for six months in the United States. He was married for the first time in 1910. While he was successful as a dentist, with Albert Einstein among his patients, and wrote a number of standard works on periodontosis, his avocation was posters. He regularly worked from three o'clock in the afternoon into the night on his passion, making a detailed index card for each poster, each of which was identified by a numbered label. His poster collection grew, and in 1905 he was one of the principal founders and then the president of the Verein der Plakatfreunde (Society of Poster Friends), which soon had regional chapters. In 1910 it founded a quarterly Das Plakat (The Poster), with Sachs as both editor and publisher.

The purpose of Das Plakat was to promote poster art, for both collectors and scholars. While there were a number of magazines devoted to posters, of Das Plakat it was said “And the clarion of this German poster exuberance was a magazine called Das Plakat, which not only exhibited the finest poster examples from Germany and other European countries, but its high standards underscored its exquisite printing, established qualitative criteria that defined the decade of graphic design between 1910 and 1920.” Moreover, “. . . . given its focus on conventional and avant garde sensibilities (it) emerged as a more historically influential review than any of the others.” During its short life from 1910 to 1921, its circulation grew from 200 to over 10,000. The Verein der Plakatfreunde ended a year later. It is unclear why the poster group and its magazine ended, possibly because of conflicts between collectors, art lovers, commercial artists, and business.

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