Emily Clarke ’24 unmasks the propaganda behind the postcards

“I think it sheds important light on always being careful of what media you’re taking in.”

– Emily Clarke ’24

Inside the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, binders replete with hand-painted postcards, messages from soldiers meticulously scrawled in cursive on the back, tell a story of World War II and the Holocaust — but perhaps not the story one may expect.

This collection of postcards, donated to the Center, are pieces of Nazi propaganda that celebrate the regime and communicate its ideology.

Watercolor drawings depict various Nazi officials, including Hitler; smiling German children holding the Nazi flag; and the German Red Cross. Emily Clarke ’24 has worked on cataloging each and every card as part of her Strassler Center internship.

Part of the collection is showcased in the Siff Gallery in the exhibit “The Art of Influence: Postcards as Propaganda,” which will be on display into the fall 2024 semester.

Mary Jane Rein, the executive director of the Center, says that the biggest goal is to remove barriers to information.

“We are in a period where misinformation and false news are rampant,” she says. “Whenever we can put out authentic archival material, it’s to everyone’s benefit.”

A psychology major with a concentration in genocide and human rights, Clarke has been painstakingly organizing and scanning. The collection of 1,471 postcards was given to Clark in May 2022 by Barry D. Hoffman, the honorary Consul General to Pakistan, an active businessman in Boston real estate, and a collector of books and ephemera. He previously donated many books that are now recognized as the Barry D. Hoffman Collection in the Rose Library. A plaque honoring Hoffman is displayed in the library as a perpetual “thank-you” to him and to Diana Bartley, who helped to establish the library through donations of thousands of books until her death in 2011. Hoffman passed away in September 2022, making the postcards his final donation to the University.

As Clarke catalogs the postcards, she analyzes the effect of propaganda on society, both during World War II and today. The most disturbing lesson thus far, she says, is just how easy it is to disseminate propaganda now, especially with the advent of social media.

“In life, different messages are being sent via all forms of media,” she says. “I think it sheds important light on always being careful of what media you’re taking in.”

The collection itself has a variety of unsettling imagery in various forms. The binders, which live in the Colin Flug Graduate Study Wing, include trading cards, cigarette pack cards, and Olympics- and holiday-themed postcards. The material is organized into 15 series, each with different messages targeted to followers of the Nazi Party and citizens of occupied territory.

The items are not all strictly from Germany. There are series from Poland, Austria, and Italy, as well.

Clarke is transcribing the postcards and trying to identify their senders, who were often soldiers.

“Much of it is trying to research the soldier who sent the postcard,” says internship supervisor Robyn Conroy, who is also the Rose librarian and archivist. “We want to see if he survived and where he was stationed. If we can decipher an address, we’ll try to research that family.”

Clarke is currently working to catalogue and identify “series eight,” which features fundraisers for the Nazi party across the entirety of Nazi-occupied Europe. She says that the biggest challenge of working with the postcards is finding a way to present them objectively and factually while remaining cognizant of the terrible events they masked.

Clarke, who wants to work in social- and trauma-based psychology, says that this project has given her a better perspective of how to respond to the trauma of genocide. Creating scholarship that helps audiences to understand the conditions that lead a society to support  the aims of a genocidal regime is central to Clarke’s work with the postcard collection, and her ultimate aim is education. She hopes that the postcard project will aid academics and educate students about propaganda.

“A lot of what analyzing these postcards involves is working with visual art, as well as writing and language,” she says. Clarke notes that the overlap between disciplines like art, literature, history, and Holocaust studies could help to blaze a path for different departments at Clark to collaborate on genocide education. She believes it’s important to make such connections, and the availability of the postcards for research will open those doors.