"Tea leaves meet Robinson. Collectible pictures for world explorers" is the title of an exhibition that will be on display at the East Frisian Tea Museum in Norden from 22 March to 21 October and was created in co-operation with the University of Oldenburg.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, the Onno Behrends tea house from Norden in East Frisia included elaborately designed tea pictures with its tea packets - and thus awakened children's passion for collecting. The memory of the scrapbooks is still alive today. Almost three years ago, a working group of academics and librarians was set up at the University of Oldenburg, which, in collaboration with the Tea Museum, dedicated itself to the tea pictures. The result is a travelling exhibition that is now opening in Norden.
At a time when there was no television, the stories of "Tea Leaf's Journey" fired the imagination of more than just children. "Karl May in the Wild West", his "Adventures with Persians, Turks and Bulgarians", "Robinson Crusoe" or the "Pictures of Störtebeker" were some of the coveted collector's albums. The 120 pictures in each series brought bygone times and distant worlds into the home. The success was so great that the Onno Behrends tea house set up a picture service that exchanged the collected pictures several times. This brought collectors young and old closer to their goal of completing one or even several albums.
With the support of the University Library and the East Frisian Tea Museum, Oldenburg academics Prof. Dr. Klaus Klattenhoff and Prof. Dr. Friedrich Wißmann worked on a treasure that had long been stored in Onno Behrends' company vault: several hundred original sketches, hand-painted and coloured by artists, which had survived the decades in excellent colour quality. They were the basis for the printed collector's pictures.