Company chronicle

1929: 50 years of Reichsdruckerei

The location

In 1929, fifty years after the founding of Reichsdruckerei, the company's premises stretched over an area of around 4 hectares (almost six football pitches!) of which around 76,000 square metres were used by the company itself and another 33,000 square metres rented out to others. The "Vossische Zeitung" newspaper wrote on the company's 50th anniversary: "Everyone heartily congratulates Reichsdruckerei on its 50th anniversary. If all state authorities received such direct and full recognition from all sectors of society, we would have an ideal state."

At the heart of Berlin's "newspaper district"
A high-profile neighbourhood grew up around Reichsdruckerei. The Central Administration of Public Debt was housed directly opposite on Oranienstraße - and connected via an underground tunnel; nearby Kochstraße was home to Ullstein & Co., Europe's biggest printing and publishing company, and just a few yards away were the headquarters of newspaper moguls Rudolf Mosse (for example, "Berliner Tageblatt" and "Berliner Morgenpost") and August Scherl (for example, "Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger", "Berliner Abendzeitung" and "Die Woche").

Back in those days, a very special atmosphere must have been felt at this unique location where slowly but surely the entire German printing and publishing sector came together. This was where the city's political, social and cultural life merged, and Reichsdruckerei, as one of the biggest employers in the area, contributed a great deal towards the spirit of this new district.

Business boomed. Due to the enormous challenges which the Reichsdruckerei had to master during World War I, the subsequent years of inflation and the young Weimar Republic, the company expanded far beyond the limits of its spatial capacity. In 1935, more than 600 female workers were crowded together in the "finishing room" which had been originally foreseen as a cloakroom. The machinery rooms were bursting at the seams and in banknote printing, the semi-finished banknotes had to be carried from one floor to the next and from one part of the building to the next.