Just back from visiting my brother. He owns and runs the family wholesale business in the fifth generation. For a
long time that business also dealt in tobacco products.
While there I came across this artifact.
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The thing above is ceramic and about 4 inch long and 1 1/2 inch high. It contains thin pieces of wood.
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The artifact is a promotion tool for, obviously, a cigarette brand. These were given to pubs and guesthouse where they were set on the tables. The sticks were used to pick fire from a candle to lighten up cigarettes and cigars.
The company Eckstein & Söhne (Eckstein & Sons) was owned by a well settled Jewish family in Dresden up to 1928 when it was sold. As the front side is emphasized that the company employs about 2,300 workers.
The interesting about this is the use of "Trustfrei" (trust-free) as a product marketing argument. It also allows to date the piece.
Trust here is an economic term:
Trusts gained economic power in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some but not all were organized as trusts in the legal sense. They were often created when corporate leaders convinced (or coerced) the shareholders of all the companies in one industry to convey their shares to a board of trustees, in exchange for dividend-paying certificates. The board would then manage all the companies in 'trust' for the shareholders (and minimize competition in the process). Eventually the term was used to refer to monopolies in general.
In the U.S. the American Tobacco Company was one of such trusts. Around the turn of the century it gained a horizontal monopoly with 80% of the tobacco market share in the U.S. and was vertically integrated from tobacco plantation down to its own retail outlets.
The equivalent in Great Britain was the Imperial Tobacco Company which was formed in 1901 out of 13 independent tobacco and cigarette companies in defense against, but in the same spirit as ATC. A year later both of these giants made a contract that excluded each other from their home market and formed a joint venture, British-American-Tobacco to capture and monopolize new markets, especially in continental Europe. Due to anti-trust legislation ATC had to sell its share in BAT in 1911 but Imperial held on to it until 1980.
BAT's attempt to capture the continental market met resistance. While, like in the U.S. and UK, it tried to get market share by bribing wholesalers not to sell any competitors products, the response was less enthusiastic than it had expected.
In 1901/02 the continent was in a deep economic crisis and in Germany there was a long and hefty national discussion for (the industrial side) and against (the agrarian site) free trade. The conservative and nationalistic agrarian side included the tobacco growers and small business like my grandfather's who himself rolled some of the cigars his company sold. There were more than a thousand cigarette factories in Germany in the early 20th century which employed ten-thousands of people. (Until 1918 cigarettes were mostly produced by hand.)
The owners and their workers lobbied hard. They founded an "Association for the Defense Against the Tobacco Trust" and marketed their products as "Trustfrei". Later in 1915 and going with the general nationalistic streams of that era the associated "Committee for Good German Advertising Language" issued a "Germanization Brochure for Commercial Advertising", urging that commercial entities employ "No foreign term for what can well be expressed in German."
"Trust" is not a German word, so the reason why "Trustfrei" on those wooden sticks above is printed in quotes may well be related to the anti-foreign language thrust.As the ceramic does not put quotes around "Trustfrei", but the refill sticks do, I think it was made between about 1910 to 1914.
Their nationalistic push was also reflected in the collection pictures that came with each pack of cigarettes.
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There were series with pictures from German colonies, 'heroic' German historic figures (above Henry the Lion) and the German military. Dads smoked and the children collected and exchanged the pictures. They glued them into special albums of which millions were printed: Nationalistic education through product marketing.
One of the original famous Eckstein brands is still available today.
It is a filter-less cigarette and even for this role-your-own addict quite strong stuff.
British-American-Tobacco, which is still conducting dubious business, never got a hand on it. But in 2002 one of BAT's original parents broke the "Trustfrei" spell. Eckstein, Dresden in 1928 sold to Neuhaus, Cologne which was bought by Reemtsma, Hamburg in the 1950s. In 2002 Reemtsma was sold to the British Imperial Tobacco Company which thereby today owns the Eckstein brand.
With the current economic crisis and huge world-wide corporations again overwhelming local markets we may again see "Trustfrei" like campaigns (Private Equity Free?, Hedge-Fund-Free?) as a defense against all-out free trade.
This time, hopefully, without the nationalistic attitude that killed so many in the first half of the 20th century.