Would anyone like to help translate this old German postcard?

[SwedishEdith]

Bought it in a market on holiday. I'm only curious because it's from 1941. It probably says nothing exciting at all.

I could translate it for you if I could just read it! That kind of script is horribly dense. So far I've worked out it's addressed to a woman who I thiink is a patient in the University Clinic in Jena (in eastern Germany, now in Thuringia), and it's from her mother. The rest of it I would need to decipher word by word.
Interesting that the art on the front is by Georg Kolbe, he was a bit of a Nazi favourite.

Oo, thank you. I hardly know any German so wouldn't have a clue and, yes, that writing is horrible to try to read. But there's quite a bit of it. Who is on the stamp, do you know?

I’m afraid I can’t read that handwriting at all.
But it’s possibly signed ‘Fam. Whiter’ or something but ‘Fam. Is a shortened version of ‘Familie’. So signed Famiy then surname

Thank you for taking a look though.

Anyone else fancy a go at deciphering this? 😊

It looks a bit like Hitler on the stamp.

He's got a moustache but not that one.

This link might be useful in deciphering the handwriting:
http://www.suetterlinschrift.de/Englisch/Sutterlin.htm
I think that the last line is 'Herzliche Grüße von uns allen. Deine Mutter' (warm wishes from all of us, your mother). The first line is maybe saying thank you for a card?

I can't help with the translation sorry, but Google says the man on the stamp is Paul Von Hindenburg, the second German president.

https://www.germanstamps.net/tr-rpst-1933-hind2/

I'm a German translator, and normally pretty good a deciphering handwriting, but its too much even for me.

Frl. Gretl [?]
z. Zt. [zur Zeit] med. Universitätsklinik
Jena
Nord II. [?]

Offenburg, 10. 8 41

Liebe Gretl!

Deine Briefe erhalten besten Dank. Wie ich sehe hast das Körbchen erhalten u. hat alles gut geschmeckt. Ja, wenn Du jetzt nicht zum Herbsten kommen thust da kannst dann zum März. Was sagste zu meinem Brief? Bist jetzt im Bild. Wie willst des Deigslan [?] mal Antwort. Bist nicht vom Bette rausgefallen als du gehört hast. Was gibt es neues? Herzliche Grüße von uns allen. Deine Mutter.

A letter from a mother in Offenbach to her daughter who is hospital in Jena.

Miss Gretl [?]
Currently in medical university hospital
Jena

Dear Gretl!

Received your letter with many thanks. I see that you received the basket and that everything was tasty. If you are unable to come in autumn, you may be able to come in March? What do you think about my letter? You are in the picture now. Will the D... ever reply [not sure about this sentence]. Did you not fall out of bed when you heard this? What's new? Warm greetings from all of us. Your mother.

Oh, wow, thank you everyone. Surprisingly - not - a pretty mundane postcard after all. Oh, well, worth a euro out of idle curiosity. And, yes, it does look like Hindenburg. "During his presidency, he played a key role in the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 when, under pressure from his advisers, he appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.[1]"

I think mundane things are interesting - my dad collects old postcards and I love reading the often trite but sometimes cryptic messages on the back. You often see postcards written with the clear expectation that they'll be read within 24 hours, which you'd never rely on these days.

I wonder what the letter said that was shocking enough to make Gretl's mum think she'd fall out of bed when she read it!

Such impressive deciphering! I didn't get any of that - I thought the name was Judith and Brief was Fürth!! I still remember doing a university module on witch trials on my year abroad, based on sixteenth century primary sources and it was a great leveller as all the native German students hugely struggled with the writing too!

Yes, I wondered that too - there is a certain humour in this brief message.

I agree, it's not widely known. I am historian by training but my late grandmother taught me Sütterlin as a teenager and sometimes used to write me letters so I could practice. It's not a script German speakers would have been taught since the 1940s, I think. My grandmother learned in the later 1940s from her better educated husband to write in the script used until today but she always preferred Sütterlin.

Oh well done WehlstMir. I wonder why Gretl was in hospital in Jena. It's miles away from Offenburg. Maybe to do with the war?

Yes, sorry, I do think the mundane is interesting as well. I just meant I wondered if there would be some explicit reference to something specific which, of course, would have been unlikely anyway. I'd never heard of Jena so googled Jena Germany 1841 and found some disturbing stuff about forced sterilisation and a doctor based at a hospital in Jena who then committed suicide in 1941. It would be making a huge leap to wonder if that's why Gretl was there but it does remind you about the mundanity of evil.

Thanks everyone again, you've all been really helpful.

Wow - that handwriting!

I love these fragments from old postcards. I follow Postcards from the Past on Twitter - often mundane, can be cryptic and sometimes quite poignant.

How fascinating OP!
Many thanks for sharing!

Great thread, SwedishEdith, old postcards are fascinating!

I'm sorry to hijack the thread and @ you,@WehIstMir , but your deciphering skills are very impressive and I was wondering if you would take a look at some correspondence between my great-grandparents for me. My grandmother included the letters in an album she made for me shortly before she died. It says underneath that the first letter is my great-grandfather Carl asking my great-grandmother Elisabeth out on their first date and the second letter (only two months later!) is her accepting his proposal of marriage. I'd love to know more details but can only make out individual words rather than whole sentences. It's not Suetterlin, just a 'normal' old-fashioned cursive script.

Sorry for the cheeky request and obviously feel free to ignore me if you don't fancy having a go!

Massively impressed with that result, WehlstMir. I had managed some of the individual words - erhalten, Antwort - but couldn’t put them together. You really need to know Suetterlin well to manage it. I was translating something from Fraktur recently and it was waay easier by comparison.
I think the word after Nord II. is Frauenabt. , she’s on a ward for women, perhaps gynecology?

"It's not a script German speakers would have been taught since the 1940s, I think." I think a simplified form of it was taught in East German schools until surprisingly late. In the early 90s I was teaching English to young people who had grown up in the East, and some of them had handwriting that was admittedly nowhere near as incomprehensible but still very tricky to outsiders - in particular there was no difference between an n and a u so they wrote that flat line above the u to distinguish it. These were people who would have been at school around 1980. I basically had to train them out of it so they could write (by hand) the answers to the Cambridge language exams.

"I wonder why Gretl was in hospital in Jena. It's miles away from Offenburg. Maybe to do with the war?" Yes, she might have been working in a nearby factory for the war effort, she might have been a student at the uni (relatively unlikely somehow), she might have been sent there from elsewhere because Jena had a specialism in her particular illness. Whatever, her mum seems a little narked at poor Gretl not contacting her enough.

In the early 90s these kinds of postcards and letters were incredibly common at the more rough-and-ready flea markets - the kind where house clearance companies would just dump down cardboard boxes full of someone's possessions after they'd died and the flat had been cleared. I used to poke thorugh those boxes looking for things to equip my own flat with, as well as old books. Pity I never started collecting those postcards though. The house clearances these days more often tend to be of people in the post-war era. It would be a great subject for an exhibition.

Oh, being on a gynaecology ward makes it sound more worrying. This is what I found earlier. Hopefully just coincidence with the location.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Letter-from-Karl-Astel-March-1-1941-asking-Berger-to-rejoin-the-Jena-EGOG-because_fig3_237096659

Interesting what you say about handwriting in E German schools.

I had a German penfriend who lived close to Lake Constance. Her Us and Ns were indistinguishable, and she used the little line above the U too. This was around 82/83 and she would have been about 13.

(Incidentally, we're still in touch - but now only by the occasional WhatsApp!)