View of a yellow phone booth with a payphone. Only mom calls from the landline, the niece writes via Whatsapp. Is telephoning dying out?
Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Uwe Zucchi
Who doesn’t know them: the yellow telephone booths, which, for the smartphone generation, were for a long time the only way to talk to your loved ones or to clarify important things when traveling or in the city.
Public telephones, which have been completely overtaken by technical progress, will soon be over in Germany. Just as the smartphone made cameras and alarm clocks superfluous for many, it also made fixed telephones in public obsolete.
We want to know from our readers: What are your memories of the yellow (and magenta) telephone booths and booths?
Did something special or strange happen to you there? Or do you even have a love story to tell us that started there? Email us your memories now [email protected]
Not always a pleasant experience
They were cramped, they mostly smelled unpleasant, and they often stank of moldy phone books, sweat or cigarette smoke. Quite a few also after urine.
If that wasn’t enough, the service was often not perfect either: the coins fell through the machine or it ran out too quickly, rascals made fun of making prank calls and impatient fellow citizens were finally waiting outside the door to be in line. For most people under 30, these memories may be alien.
End of January is over
As Telekom announced in Bonn, on Monday, November 21, coin payment was “deactivated” on the approximately 12,000 remaining telephones nationwide. From the end of January, the entire telecommunications service is to be discontinued.
After 142 years, it is the end of an era that began in Berlin in 1881 with the first “telephone kiosk”.
Six yellow telephone booths of the Deutsche Bundespost with customers waiting in front, photographed in 1985. Whether as a mobile phone in the vest pocket, as a landline device in the variants cordless or wired or even as a black nostalgic with a turntable from the house with the beautiful things: practically no object has in the changed people’s lives in the last 150 years like the telephone.
Photo: picture alliance / dpa | Jörg Schmitt
In the past, Germany’s yellow telephone booths from the Bundespost stood out from the cityscape or landscape. The peak was reached in the mid-1990s, when Telekom alone, as the successor to the Bundespost, operated more than 160,000 telephones, which were not only to be found in shopping streets or, as recently, at train stations or airports, but also in residential areas or at the edge of forests. The columns were no longer economically viable.
Do you miss the good old phone booth?
Even if telephone booths and booths have disappeared from the street scene, older people still have many memories of them. What today is just a short message or Whatsapp was often associated with many circumstances back then. Public payphones will soon be history in Germany. Time for Memories: Will you miss the iconic phone booths?
Totally, they simply belong to the cityscape.
53%
20 votes
No, they are simply outdated and have to go.
18%
7 votes
I’ve hardly noticed them for years.
29%
11 votes
A second life
By the time the last telephone steles have been finally dismantled, the year 2025 will have dawned, according to Telekom. However, around 3,000 of the last 12,000 locations are to continue to be used without a telephony function: converted as antennas that amplify mobile phone signals.
Numerous converted telephone booths are currently in use throughout Germany. Be it as a bookcase, ice cream kiosk, mini recording studio or even a shower cubicle. You can buy discarded phone booths on Ebay or from Telekom itself. In the central warehouse near Potsdam, the yellow cells have long been sold out. Some of the approximately 300-kilogram gray-magenta colors are still available for collection, says a Telekom spokeswoman. Price: around 500 euros.
Nostalgics get their money’s worth in Frankfurt am Main in the Museum for Communication. There you can see more than 50 objects related to public telephony.
We want to know from our readers: What are your memories of the yellow (and magenta) telephone booths and booths?
Did something special or strange happen to you there? Or do you even have a love story to tell us that started there?
Email us your memories now [email protected]. We are looking forward to your message!
