They have been an integral part of the city’s furniture for so long, Berliners admit to taking them for granted.

But concrete advertising pillars, known as Litfaßsäule – or Litfaß columns – after the man who invented them, around 3,000 of which dot the German capital, are under threat. A low-key, grassroots protest has sprung up in an effort to save them from destruction and sparked a trend involving writing messages on the pillars, as well as poems and heart felt tributes.

It takes two or three people to group hug a Litfaßsäule, and that has also become another way of highlighting the reluctance to let them go.

But city authorities responsible for managing the columns and the posters plastered on them – traditionally advertising cultural events, at a fraction of the cost of billboard advertising – say the pillars have had their day. Many are crumbling and some might even contain asbestos, they argue. Old-fashioned Litfaßsäule it seems, are falling victim to more timely – and profitable – targeted marketing and digital advertising.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Berlin ‘living advertising pillar’ campaign for the German People’s Party, June 1920 Photograph: Alfred Gross/ullstein bild via Getty Images

They were invented in 1855 by the Berlin printer Ernst Litfaß, (pronounced Lit-fass) who had been appalled by the random practice of pasting adverts on trees and building facades, and was inspired by the advertising posts he saw in Paris and London. Litfaß, who was also an actor, poet, impresario, and events manager, but made most of his fortune as the “Reklamkönig” or advertising king, received immediate praise for bringing order to the streets, as well as the blessing of the city’s chief of police with whom he shared the advertising profits.

The 3m-high pillars soon became not just notice boards – often used for posting lonely heart searches, cultural events, political campaigns, news from the war front, and even wanted posters – but were also popular as meeting points and remain so today. Later the hollow cylinders became useful as toilets and telecommunication substations.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The cover of Emil and the Detectives

Germany’s most famous Litfaßsäule, in the western Berlin district of Wilmersdorf, is featured on the cover of the 1929 children’s novel Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner. The pillar, on what is now Bundesallee, is used by the child investigator Emil Tischbein to hide from a suspected criminal. The original is no longer standing, but the pillar still regularly attracts tourists.

Now it is swathed in blank paper, awaiting removal and, like around a thousand others due to be scrapped across the city, has been inscribed with the handwritten message: “Save this pillar!”

Messages elsewhere on pillars in the southern district of Kreuzberg read: “Don’t let go!” while one contains a tribute poem to Litfaß, declaring how he will “never be forgotten”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bye bye Litfasssaule was written by an unknown sprayer on a column on BlucherstraBe in Kreuzberg. Photograph: Paul Zinken/dpa/Alamy Stock

While the majority are in Berlin, the total number of Litfaßsäule across Germany is about 50,000, though they are reportedly disappearing fast. More than half of the 879 columns in Hamburg have gone over the past decade. In Görlitz, on the border with Poland, the mayor Michael Wieler, has tried to stop their demise by calling on citizens and cultural institutions to adopt them. He told the Leipzig radio station Detektor FM he was looking into their possible use as 5G signal masts to ensure they remained relevant.

Christian Kappe, a spokesman for Wall advertising, told German TV that many of the pillars were simply too old and made of a fibre cement that disintegrated over time. “Most of Berlin’s columns are from the early post-war period, and they are simply quite porous and ageing. Neither can we rule out the fact that some of the concrete might include asbestos,” he said.

Dörte Blute, a 65-year-old former telecommunications clerk living in a western Berlin suburb on a street with a column, admitted she had not given the existence of the columns much thought until she became aware of the plans to remove them, but said she could not imagine life without them.

“I grew up with them,” she said. “They’re such an integral part of the city as I know it, and I don’t like the thought that they’re being dismantled or even replaced with shiny new pillars.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charlottenburg, street scene in Berlin, 1940 Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

She dismissed the plans to replace the older ones with new illuminated, digitalised versions and argued that the pillars remained eye-catching and informative.

“I’m certainly still more drawn to a catchy poster on the Litfaßsäule, than I am to something that flashes up on my mobile phone which I’m likely to swipe away in annoyance,” she added.

The columns require upkeep – not least the need to scrape away the posters after on average 150 layers have been pasted onto them, as well as dealing with erosion caused by dogs urinating against them. But cultural institutes are among those throwing their weight around the calls for them to stay. “They’re still a great way of reaching new target groups,” the communications officer of a Berlin cabaret venue wrote on Twitter.