Louis Oppenheim

He was born in Coburg in 1879, into a Jewish family, in a house on a street called Sonntagsanger. Coburg was a small ducal residence town in northern Bavaria — pleasant, provincial, and nowhere near the centre of anything. Sources give two different birthdays for him, 4 May and 10 March; the year is not in doubt, the day is, and we would rather say so than pick one.

At twenty he left for London and stayed seven years, from 1899 to 1906. What exactly he studied there is thinly recorded, which is frustrating, because those London years are almost certainly where the commercial instinct came from — Britain had a mature advertising trade decades before Germany did.

He settled in Berlin and opened as a commercial graphic artist in 1910. The timing was perfect. Berlin was inventing modern advertising, and a group of designers around the poster trade were stripping the picture down to one object, one word, one flat field of colour — what became known as the Berliner Plakatstil, the Berlin poster style. Oppenheim became one of its leading practitioners. He signed everything with two blunt letters: LO.

The client list reads like an inventory of German industry: AEG the electrical giant, the Reichsbahn railways, Henkel's Persil, Kaffee HAG, the office-machine firm Adrema. During the First World War he turned the same skills to the state, drawing for the Kriegsanleihe — the war-loan drives that funded the fighting — and earning official recognition for it in 1917. His best-known wartime sheet, Wir Barbaren! ("We barbarians!"), answered Allied propaganda not with a soldier but with a wall of statistics: literacy rates, Nobel prizes, books published, schools funded, ranged against France and Britain. It is a strange, very modern thing — an infographic as national defence.

He died in Berlin on 20 February 1936, aged fifty-six. He did not live to see the worst of what followed, but he lived long enough to see the beginning: local accounts from Coburg record that the Nazi regime condemned the work of a designer the German state itself had once commissioned.

Oppenheim's discipline was reduction. A poster has one second to work on someone walking past, so everything that is not the message has to go. That habit shows up in all three of the things he made — posters, letters, and, once, money.

The letters came through H. Berthold AG, the great Berlin type foundry. He drew Lo-Type around 1914 — named for his own monogram — a heavy, slightly condensed face with an odd, appealing warmth to it, and later Fanfare in 1927. He also drew the light weight of Berthold Block, one of the most-used advertising faces in Germany. Both Lo-Type and Fanfare have been digitally revived and are still set today, which is a rare afterlife for a 1910s commercial typeface.

Then came the coin. In 1919 the new republic needed small change and had almost nothing to make it from. Silver had vanished into hoards, copper and nickel had gone into the war. The answer was aluminium — a 50 Pfennig weighing about 1.65 grams, so light it barely registered in the hand. Oppenheim designed it, working alongside Reinhard Kullrich, who came from a Berlin family of mint medallists and knew the die shop side of the job.

What they produced is worth looking at closely, because of what is missing. There is no eagle, no head of state, no coat of arms. The imperial eagle belonged to a monarchy that had just collapsed, and the republic had not yet agreed what should replace it. So instead of a symbol of the state, the coin carries a bundle of wheat ears and an old German proverb: SICH REGEN BRINGT SEGEN — stir yourself and you will be blessed, or in plain English, hard work pays off.

That is an advertising man's solution to a constitutional problem. When you cannot say who you are, say what you believe. It is also, quietly, one of the very few modern circulating coins to put a folk saying at the centre of the design rather than a ruler or an emblem — and the lettering, laid across the sheaf in blackletter, is handled by someone who thought about letterforms for a living.