Recreation places for Berlin children

The Federal Republic issued two semi-postals on 1 February 1957 inscribed ERHOLUNGSPLÄTZE FÜR BERLINER KINDER — recreation places for Berlin children. The surtax paid for the holiday camps that took children out of the blockaded and divided city for the summer. Domfil catalogues the pair as 957.2/3, «Llegada a la colonia» and «Salida de vacaciones».

The 10 + 5 pfennig in olive-green and red shows three children setting out, the eldest carrying a pennant on a staff and two of them a suitcase between them; the 20 + 10 pfennig in blue and orange shows a woman receiving two arriving children. Arthur Schraml and Elisabeth Krauss-Guyer designed them in a flat, poster-like style, and Bagel Security-Print produced them in offset, 33 × 28 mm, comb perforation 13¼ × 13, four million of each. They expired for postage on 31 December 1958.

A doubt worth recording. Nothing in these designs is Scouting: no fleur-de-lis, no neckerchief, no organisation named, and the children wear ordinary clothes. The subject is a state welfare scheme for city children, not a youth movement, and the closest the design comes is the pennant carried by the girl on the 10 pfennig. Domfil files the pair under children's summer camps and indexes it by the camp motif, as it does for holiday and welfare issues elsewhere; on the evidence of the stamps themselves the connection to Scouting is thematic at best.