Hurrah, alle neune [Hurrah, all nine!]

Public subscription to a series of nine war loans provided over 60% of Germany's war costs. Posters promoting war loans aimed to empower and mobilise the civilian public, and became more aesthetically creative as the war went on. Many of Germany's war loan posters presented the public with Imperial and heroic subjects. The use of caricature was extensive, and posters increasingly aimed to divert attention from domestic hardship by trivialising and encouraging hatred of the enemy. In this poster, humour and dynamic design are used to show the 8th war loan literally bowling away the enemy. The various allies (including stereotypical caricatures of France, England, Russia and America) are presented as helpless bowling pins, suggesting that the powerful war loan (presumably thrown by the German people) would be a successful strike against them. This is one of 13 First World War posters purchased by the Memorial at the auction of the Dr Hans Sachs poster collection in 2013. Leopold Karl Walter Graf von Kalkreuth (1855–1928) was a German painter and etcher. A direct descendant of field-marshal Friedrich Adolf Graf von Kalckreuth, Leopold was born at Düsseldorf, received his first training at Weimar from his father, the landscape painter Count Stanislaus von Kalckreuth (1820–1894), and subsequently studied at the academies of Weimar and Munich. He was one of the founders of the Secessionist movement in German art in 1892. In 1879, after military service, he enrolled at the Akademie in Munich, where he attended drawing classes and continued his study of painting under Karl Theodor von Piloty and Wilhelm von Diez. In 1883 he travelled to the Netherlands and then to Italy and France. In 1885 he accepted a teaching appointment at the Kunstschule in Weimar, but in 1890 he resigned and returned to Munich.