Landships II

Well, the Persil box seems to have been A Thing, although here it appears to be in use as a tray from which something is being sold. And it's obviously post-1918.

The boxes the Persil laundry detergent packets were transported in seem to have been common. I found an image of some French Persil boxes from the 1920s.

Note how the boxes were made - dovetail joints - I could imagine the reaction if you asked for that these days.

Charlie

Pity we don't have someone knowledgeable about German pre-WW1 culture to comment. I think the author of the article may have missed

the point about the devil in the German poster. I wonder if it wouldn't be interpreted as "so good it must be sinful and a gift from the devil".

I think we've lost any feel for how hard laundry was to do pre-washing machine - anything which could make the task easier would be

considered a boon.  

Charlie

Mr. Fegan has very kindly supplied this additional information:

The Persil connection to Mephisto started when I was sent an image of the 1909 Persil Devil poster a couple of years ago and was struck by the obvious similarities. I was familiar with Persil being a name for parsley and the superstitions linking parsley and the devil, though God only knows why my brain had chosen to remember that random fact!  I had also read the term Persilschein in connection with the post war de-Nazification process.  The rest was just following up leads.

I think that in Mr. Fagen's position we would all have spotted the similarities, but he was in the happy position of getting there first and was kind enough to share his discovery. How remarkable that in over a century, no one had come across it before, even among the Mephisto cognoscenti.

Of course, Wikipedia carries only the incomplete, uninformed, post-WWII explanation of Persilschein.