Post stops working – if you still want to send a telegram, you have to be quick

Only the baby boomers among us know this song line: "Arrive Friday the 13th stop At 2 p.m. stop Christine stop" Reinhard Mey sang it on an album from 1969, the text was dedicated to his first wife.

At the time, hardly any fan of the musician with the soft tones was surprised at the telegram style of the title. Shortly before the arrival of his Christine, the one he was singing about received the telegram, he had to rush to prepare his apartment and food, until he ended up in chaos and realized: The 13th was only the next day, he still had all the time in the world.

Today, it is mostly older people who still know what a telegram is: a short message posted on site that reaches the addressee as a physical letter within a few hours and over long distances. It has always been expensive and has definitely been outdated since the days of short messages on mobile phones.

It's too late for that anyway: Deutsche Post is one of the last postal companies in the world to discontinue telegram, this outdated messaging service. There hasn't been a delivery on Sunday or abroad for four years.

December 31st is now finally over, as the online service Paketda.de reports and as the post office also confirms. Before that, France, Austria, Switzerland and most recently Hungary abolished the telegram. The demand is too low, the reason given by Deutsche Post. However, there is no official announcement from the group.

The doctor Thomas von Sömmering, who developed a telegraph on an electro-chemical basis in 1809, is considered one of the inventors in this country. In 1837, the researcher Samuel Finley Morse presented the first electric telegraph in the USA, complete with a Morse code.

Ten years later, a telegram was sent for the first time in the Austrian Empire. As early as 1858 there was a Morse connection between Great Britain and the USA via underwater cable. At that time it was a revolution: while it took several days or weeks to send a letter, the telegram offered the possibility of sending information within hours. Private telephones in all households were still a topic for the future.

The technical description reads: A telegram is a message sent by telegraph using acoustic, optical or electrical devices. In the vast majority of cases, telegrams were sent by telex to a post or telegraph office near the recipient.

The sender dictated his text, together with the recipient's address, to an official in the post or telegraph office, either in person or by telephone. You could pay either in the office, by telephone bill or by inserting coins into the public telephone.

Since the fee was always based on the number of words, the telegram style quickly developed using short forms instead of complete sentences. In the receiving office, the telex strip of paper was pasted into a card and delivered by messenger, usually within two hours of posting the telegram.

Incidentally, the secrecy of letters also applies to telegrams: the receiving employee may neither pass on the content to others nor falsify it.

During the heyday of telegram use in Germany, postal service, telephone service and telegraph service were combined under one roof. In 1978 there were 13 million telegrams, in 1990 around 1.7 million and in 2000 only 70,000, according to Swiss Post. Mobile phones, SMS messages and a wide variety of short message services have long dominated this form of communication.

Most recently, companies have used the telegram, for example to send greetings to long-standing employees on a personal basis. Or they used it to send reminders. The Post speaks of an "attention-grabbing product".

The telegram is posted in Swiss Post's online shop – or, analogously, by telephone. According to Swiss Post, if this is done by 3 a.m., the message will be delivered the same day. Postmen then ring the bell at the recipient's door and deliver it personally.

That has its price. "Anyone who has recently sent a telegram certainly didn't do it out of common sense," says Steffen Persiel, operator of the online portal Paketda.de. After all, the basic price for the message is a whopping 12.90 euros, which includes 160 characters.

Telegrams up to 480 characters cost 18.35 euros. Fees for the so-called decorative leaf add up to a good four euros: a flower picture or "muffin with candles" for holidays, "jump" as a youthful photo motif or "consolation donation" with a staircase with autumn leaves are the offers on the post page. As I said, all this is only possible until the end of the year.

"Everything on shares" is the daily stock exchange shot from the WELT business editorial team. Every morning from 5 a.m. with the financial journalists from WELT. For stock market experts and beginners. Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Amazon Music and Deezer. Or directly via RSS feed.