Siegwerk had survived the war without great damage. The factory was hit by shells in the conflict’s final weeks, but no major harm was done. The laboratories and equipment remained intact, and the warehouses contained raw material. Management’s main job was to restart production, which had been shut down in the last months of the war.
The difficulties were enormous. Raw materials and other resources were hard to obtain. Some important goods could only be acquired on the black market and in exchange for natural produce. Electricity and coal for energy production were strictly rationed, and the most important transport routes were destroyed or badly damaged. Barges could not use the Rhine due to fallen bridges and sunken vessels. Additionally, partitioning of the country in four occupation zones limited the operating range of Siegwerk to the British zone, to which Siegburg belonged.
All the same, the starting conditions for the company were not bad by comparison to others. Other printing ink factories were destroyed or located in the Soviet zone, so that resumption of operations was delayed or impossible. By contrast, the facilities in Siegburg were fully serviceable. Raw materials were available, and the British occupation authorities, who rationed electricity and coal deliveries, wanted to restart the economy in their zone as fast as possible.
As early as the summer of 1945, Siegwerk already had the energy sources to restart production. By January 1946, it was receiving 2000 kilowatts of electricity and seven to eight tons of coal a month. With that, 25 workers could run 48 production hours a week. Printing inks played a very minor role in the first months after the conflict. Rather, Siegwerk used intact facilities and available raw materials to produce goods for people’s daily needs.
Materials to restore and build homes were what was mainly missing in Germany after the destructive war. Siegwerk adjusted to the situation and developed many products for building needs. In 1945, the factory manufactured about 51 tons of window putty and bronze for corrosion protection. Naphthol pitch, formerly employed in the production of oil-based gravure inks, was used to make paint that rendered roofing paper more weather-proof. Since the paint had an attractive brown colour and dried very fast, it was also used for floors. Siegwerk also produced varnish for cement roofing tiles, wood stain, glue for shoes and for use in the medical sector, and even some luxury articles like nail varnish and nail varnish remover. This was lucrative business, since the goods involved were sold in small quantities and fetched good prices.
In March 1946, Siegwerk received the long-awaited operation license from the British occupation authorities. This “big permit” entailed larger rations of electricity, coal and raw materials for the production quantities authorised. Officially, Siegwerk could now produce 80 tons of gravure ink, 25 tons of newspaper ink, ten tons of special printing ink, 40 tons of window putty, 30 tons of anti-corrosion paint and 20 tons of roof sealing material per month. This rather curious product mix was typical for the first years after the war. Almost half of the products had nothing to do with the company’s main business, but could be produced with the existing materials and equipment.
Revenue from ‘side products’ made up for the modest sales of printing inks in the first months after the war. Though the printing machines in Germany were gradually getting restarted, paper remained scarce and demand for ink thus low. Newspapers, magazines, school books and official forms – for which Siegwerk delivered the ink – all appeared in relatively small quantities. Additionally, important customers like the Deutsche Verlag in Berlin had been destroyed during the war. In the entire year of 1945, sales of gravure inks amounted to 30,000 kilos. Before the war, Siegwerk had been producing 1.4 million kilograms.
The poster and artistic inks Siegwerk began to produce in small quantities were a success, but did not generate huge profits. Business relations with the rising Burda publishing house could not yet make up for lost revenue at home and abroad. All the same, sales of gravure inks tripled 1946 in comparison to 1945, reaching around 98,000 kilos.
Compared to sales in the pre-war years, however, revenue from gravure inks was totally unsatisfactory in 1946. Along with weak demand, the borders of the occupation zones played a major part in this. Every delivery to another zone had to be approved by an inter-zone authority set up by the Allies. That led to significant delays in deliveries to the French and American zones, as the 1946 annual report notes. Exports to the Russian zone, “where printing businesses are relatively busy” were usually not allowed by the inter-zone authority, which argued that “printing inks should remain in their own zone, due to expected further shortages of certain raw materials.”
Things were similar in exports. When international postal traffic was resumed on April 1, 1946, orders from foreign customers began to reach Siegwerk again. But the authorities would not make raw materials available for export goods. This applied to chemical products, along with iron for the manufacture of transport containers. The “Joint Export Import Agency” (JEIA) set up by the Allies also imposed an elaborate authorisation and control procedure for exports, which made exports of small and medium shipments virtually impossible. Because of these barriers, exports played a very minor role in the first post-war years.
One basic problem for Siegwerk was the poor quality of raw materials available. That particularly affected letterpress inks. In this segment, Siegwerk mainly produced black ink for newspapers and ration vouchers, blended with safety colorants. These inks were based on low-quality resins and mineral oils, which led to quality compromises and many complaints.
All the same, the new inks for letterpress constituted an important new production area. Since gravure business was developing badly in 1946, management decided to create a new department for book and newspaper printing inks, which also produced offset inks along with letterpress inks. With a few small machines, larger quantities of letterpress inks could be produced as early as August 1946. In that year, Siegwerk made about 21,000 kilos of letterpress and offset inks, including almost 20,000 kilos of black newspaper ink.
Plans to expand the new department could not be implemented in 1947. Since the Reichsmark was increasingly losing spending power, new and more powerful machines could not be bought. Also, there was a lack of raw materials like linseed oil, which were important for the quality of the product. In addition to that, the British authorities were unwilling to authorise a sufficient iron contingency with which to make containers for transportation, despite Siegwerk’s energetic attempts to persuade them. In these circumstances, production of letterpress and offset inks stagnated in 1947.
In the gravure ink segment, developments were more positive even though production in 1947 only reached 154,000 kilos – some ten percent of the pre-war level. Profits in this department were largely generated by painting inks, sales of which boomed from just under 6,000 kilos in 1946 to around 270,000 pots – even lower than from the numbers during the 1930’s.
Economic growth and normalisation of business only started after the currency reform in June 1948, which stabilised the West German economy with the introduction of the Deutschmark. While Siegwerk continued to earn money with ‘side products’, mainly painting inks, production of gravure and letterpress inks doubled and finally took the largest share of overall sales again. The trend was reinforced in the foundation year of the Federal Republic, 1949, when sales of gravure inks amounted to almost 526,000 kilos, and production of letterpress inks grew to about 150,000 kilograms. Side products lost their significance. Production of window putty ceased, manufacture of roof and house paints dropped to just 2,000 kilos, and only 1,400 kilos of drawing inks were produced – to disappear from the portfolio entirely in the following year. The positive trend was reinforced in 1950 when the Korean War boosted international demand for coal, steel and machines, invigorating German exports.
First signs of an economic boom, soon to be known as the “Wirtschaftswunder” (economic miracle), became apparent as early as 1951. Like others, Siegwerk benefited from the development. The gravure department finally registered sales of more than a million kilos again in 1951. Side products were no longer being made, so that production was focused on traditional business with inks and related products – like solvents and detergents. The letterpress department was also able to boost production to almost 170,000 kilos.
At the beginning of the 1950’s, Siegwerk had once again established itself as a producer of quality inks. When the European Steel and Coal Community was founded in April 1951 as the first step towards the process which would lead to the European Union, the ink with which the treaty was printed came from Siegburg. That was symbolic, since each of the six founding members made a representative contribution to the printing of the historical document. The ink came from Germany, and the Federal Government had chosen Siegwerk among many venerable producers because of the reliable quality of its inks. Siegwerk and the German printing ink industry had once again reached world standards at the beginning of the decade, as demonstrated by the first international trade fair for printing and paper – the drupa in Düsseldorf, which took place from May 26 to June 10, 1951. At the drupa, Siegwerk showcased book and gravure printing work done with its inks. That included mono- and multi-coloured pictures, magazines and newspapers from well-known publishers like DuMont Schauberg, L. Schwann, Girardet, Kalle & Co. or Bagel. Additionally, packaging inks with which to print paper bags, cellophane and – most importantly – cigarette packets were highlighted. Inks with which to imprint metal like tooth paste tubes and shoe polish tins also aroused special interest.
As domestic consumption increased during the “Wirtschaftswunder” years, business with packaging inks flourished. More and more brand products with lavishly designed packaging hit the stores. The new supermarkets, in which customers served themselves, increasingly took the place of small grocery stores which had still sold some goods as loose wares. Edeka, one of the market leaders in the German food retail business, switched to self-service in 1954. This development put increasing emphasis on packaging design, which was to help persuade customers to buy products.
Siegwerk’s printing inks helped shape the appearance of many brands. Among the company’s end users at the beginning of the 1950’s were well-known producers like Beiersdorf, Knorr, Unilever, Jacobs Kaffee, Meßmer Tee and Kölner Zucker. Already, Siegwerk could offer a broad portfolio of inks for packaging printing. In an advertisement, it promoted its “special inks for metal printing, special paper and all varieties of foil including coated and uncoated metal foil, transparent foil (normal and weatherproof), igelit, supronyl, genotherm, polyethylene and others.” The various materials were mainly used in the fast-growing food and cosmetics industries.
The production of packaging inks required special expertise. Speed was essential. Inks needed to dry fast, so as not to form deposits on machines at high printing speeds. At the same time, gloss was desired – but without side effects like blocked reels or stack set-offs. The producers of food packaging also needed an abrasion-proof ink film, sufficiently resistant to the foods contained in the packaging. To meet these requirements, Siegwerk established a new laboratory for development, application technology and quality control lead by Dr. Doris Krause at the beginning of the 1950’s.
Rising affluence did not only lead to increasing consumption of foods, cosmetics and luxury products – Germans also bought more newspapers and magazines. In Siegburg, production of letterpress inks grew. Sales doubled from about 150,000 kilos to around 300,000 kilos between 1949 and 1954. More than 80 percent of that volume consisted of black newspaper ink.
Siegwerk also supplied large quantities of publication gravure inks for illustrated magazines. Among the most important customers were Burda, Bauer and Springer. In 1950, printing of the popular radio magazine “Hörzu” required 6,000 kilos of Siegwerk ink every week. Machines were already running at 15,000 rotations per hour.
The first magazines in colour also reached readers in 1950. Dr. Willy Hümmelchen and Dr. Elmar Dressbach were present at proof printing when Cologne publisher DuMont Schauberg issued the first edition of the “Neue Illustrierte” – with a photo of Gina Lollobrigida on the cover. In 1953, Burda’s “Bunte” entered the market – with several pages of colour photos in every issue, a sensation in those years of black and white. The magazine’s success helped Burda become West Germany’s biggest gravure business by 1955 – and Siegwerk, which delivered the “colours of success” to Burda, grew hand-in-hand with the publisher. The two million kilo milestone for gravure ink sales was passed in 1954, with four million reached in 1957. Thus, Siegwerk became the biggest producer of publication gravure inks in Germany.
