The PostMuseum, where a tiny country turned stamps into diplomacy

The PostMuseum is the museum hardly anyone plans for and nearly everyone is glad they found. It’s free, it’s open every day, and in twenty minutes it explains something I think is key to Liechtenstein. For a country this small, a stamp was a way of telling the world it existed.

A 1930 museum in a lottery building

The museum was founded in 1930, when the German stamp dealer Hermann E. Sieger gave his collection of Liechtenstein stamps to the government. Its first rooms opened in 1936 in the Vaduz post office building, it moved several times, and since 1957 it has been in the Engländerbau, the 1933 building put up for an English-run lottery. In 2006 it became part of the LandesMuseum.

Its founder’s story has an uncomfortable side, and I’d rather mention it. The Historisches Lexikon records that Sieger was a Nazi party official in his German home town and that he was expelled from Liechtenstein in 1945. The museum he left behind is another matter, and today it’s one of the best on the Städtle.

It was thoroughly renovated in 2018, and in 2019 it made the European Museum Forum’s shortlist for the museum-of-the-year award, three years after the Treasure Chamber in the same building.

From sketch to sheet

Every stamp Liechtenstein has put out since 1912 is in its collection. They don’t all fit in the display cases, but a large share is on show, and the rest are in a digital catalogue you can use in the museum or at home.

What interests me isn’t the individual stamps so much as the process. There are artists’ original designs, printing plates and sheets, and together they show how an idea ends up on a scrap of paper a few centimetres across. There are techniques you don’t expect too, such as laser-cut stamps that look like paper cut-outs, and the embroidered stamp issued in 2019 for the principality’s 300th anniversary.

If you’re travelling with a collector, leave them here and don’t watch the clock. As a non-collector I come away with two ideas, that every stamp passes through an artist’s hands before it reaches the printer, and that this country has taken unusual care over that detail for more than a century. For non-collectors this is the best corner. For collectors, the Lexikon notes that the museum also keeps stamps from other Universal Postal Union countries and a library of postal history.

What was the Lindauer Bote?

The other half of the museum is postal history, and it has a lovely route at its heart. From the 15th century the Lindauer Bote carried letters, goods and passengers from Lindau, on Lake Constance, to Milan, passing through what is now Liechtenstein. Until 1826 it ran every week. According to the museum, Ulrich Fugger of the Augsburg merchant family used it, and so did Goethe on one of his Italian journeys, and you can follow the route here in an interactive display. I like it as a reminder that this strip of valley was a through route between Lake Constance and Italy long before it was a country, and that the post was part of that story from the very start.

Why stamps matter so much here

The first Liechtenstein stamps came out on 1 February 1912, thanks to a postal treaty with Austria, and since 1921 the post has been handled with Switzerland without the country ever giving up its own issues. For a state this size, each issue was a small embassy travelling the world. Collectors caught on early and still hunt for them everywhere.

If you want to buy stamps, this isn’t the place. It’s all on my page about Liechtenstein stamps, with the shops and what to know before ordering online from the UK. And if you’re after a souvenir stamp in your passport, that isn’t done here either but at the Liechtenstein Center, the tourist office, for CHF 3.

Fitting it into your day

Because it’s open seven days a week, 10:00 to 17:00, I’d use it to fill gaps. It’s at Städtle 37, next to the Treasure Chamber and in the same building as the Kunstraum Engländerbau on the second floor, the contemporary art space that opens in the afternoons and doesn’t charge either. With all three, without leaving the building, you get a very well-spent hour and a half.

For the rest of the street, with hours and prices, see the museums of Liechtenstein page.