This is a single issue of a German women’s magazine from January 1957 — burda-Moden, published monthly out of Offenburg in Baden by the Modenverlag Aenne Burda. It is not a book in any narrative sense but a working object: a dense, practical package of sewing patterns, fabric advertising, mail-order cosmetics, and craft instruction, priced at DM 1.70 a copy or DM 1.50 by subscription plus delivery, with a separate distribution point in Saarbrücken for Saarland readers. What survives on the page is a complete picture of how a mid-century household magazine functioned — part catalogue, part instruction manual, part marketplace.
The Core Argument
The issue makes no argument in the usual sense; its logic is commercial and instructional at once. Everything in it is organized around a single promise: that a woman with a sewing machine, a few metres of cloth, and the right pattern number can produce the clothes her family wears. The magazine supplies the patterns, the fabric brands, the notions, the cosmetics, and even the correction notices when a previous issue got a measurement wrong. Its authority rests on precision — sizes, prices, consumption figures in metres — and on the trust that a named publisher and named advertisers are meant to carry.
Inside the Book
Patterns, Prices, and the Model Pages
The commercial heart of the issue is its pattern system, and the pricing is carefully graded. Red patterns — coats, jackets, suits, dresses, men’s suits — cost DM 2. Blue patterns, the simpler skirts and blouses, cost DM 1.50. Special sizes run higher: DM 4.50 for large models, DM 3.50 for small. burda-exclusive patterns are DM 3.50, special cuts for exclusive models DM 5.50, and each basic block pattern DM 3. Alongside these sit the embroidery offerings: No. 160, the handwork piece of the month, at DM 3.50; No. 161, four doilies in coloured embroidery, at DM 2.50; and two cushions, one plain and one in silk, at DM 1.50 each.
Then come the models themselves. The title model, 4001, is a slim wool dress in sizes 42/44 with buttoned pocket flaps and a leather belt. Models 4002 through 4008 move into festive territory — brocade and evening dresses, each with its fabric consumption spelled out — and 4008 is a suit with a fitted jacket and revers. The later numbers, 4011 to 4064, widen the range to day dresses, skirts, blouses, morning coats, aprons, petticoats, children’s clothing, and men’s wear. A correction notice sits among them: in burda-Moden 11, page 29, the fabric consumption for model 9884, a children’s morning coat, should read 2.90 m at 90 cm wide, not 1.90 m.
Advertising and the Household Economy
The advertisements carry as much of the issue’s character as the patterns do. Indanthren-brand textiles are pushed on their fastness — wash-fast, light-fast, weather-fast — with the label identified as a registered trademark, and a joking passage about family bath towels (“Mutti ist blau,” “Vati rosa”) recommends that each member of the household have a colour of their own. Around this core of fabric advertising cluster the notions and machines: Gütermann sewing silk, Singer sewing machines, UHU-Sine starch. Then the personal and domestic products: Frauengold tonic for women and Eidran for men, Serum L 54 breast milk from Laboratoire Pandora in Lausanne, Dragees Neunzehn from Prof. Dr. med. H. Much, Pond’s Hand Cream, Patra cosmetics, Siemens household appliances, and the Sodener Asthma-Briefe. A Melitta coffee filter prize competition from 1956 appears with its winners listed — a reminder that the magazine ran contests and kept its readers’ names on file.
Craft Instruction
The issue closes on pure instruction: knitting patterns for children’s garments and stockings, followed by a detailed guide to knitting the heel and toe, covering both the rectangular and the triangular cap. It is the least commercial material in the magazine and the most technical — the point at which the reader stops choosing and starts working.
Key Ideas
The issue is built on the assumption that its reader is a producer, not merely a consumer. She is addressed as someone who will measure fabric, follow a pattern number, and knit a heel. The advertising speaks to her in the same register, offering durability and family practicality rather than glamour alone. Prices are stated plainly and repeatedly, which tells us the reader was expected to budget carefully and compare. And the correction notice reveals something about the whole enterprise: accuracy mattered, because a wrong consumption figure meant wasted money and wasted cloth.
Themes
Read as a document, the issue is a portrait of the West German household economy in the late 1950s — the years of reconstruction and modest prosperity, when a monthly magazine could sell patterns, tonics, and coffee filters to the same woman in the same sitting. Gender roles are explicit and unexamined: women are addressed by the tonics and the cosmetics, men by Eidran, and the clothing ranges from aprons and petticoats to men’s suits and children’s morning coats, mapping the family by garment. There is also a quiet commercial architecture underneath the domestic surface — registered trademarks, exclusive patterns, graded price tiers, and a prize competition with published winners — all of it designed to keep a reader returning month after month.
Why It Matters
The issue endures as evidence rather than as literature. It preserves, in exact figures, what it cost to dress a family in 1957 and how a woman was expected to do it: which patterns cost two marks and which cost five-fifty, how many metres of ninety-centimetre cloth a child’s coat required, which brands promised not to fade. Historians of fashion, of advertising, of domestic labour, and of postwar Germany can read the whole arrangement off these pages — the sewing silk and the asthma letters, the brocade evening dress and the knitted heel — because nothing in it was written to be remembered, and that is precisely why it is worth keeping.
