i
And so I get to Germany and revolution. Up on my red shelf in the dome are also my Bauhaus pots. They are stacks of porcelain.
The Bauhaus is revolution in itself.
When Walter Gropius is made director of the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, he declares that this school will ‘raze the arrogant wall between artist and artisan, and clear the way for the new building of the future’. Bauen, building, gets used a lot in the manifestos. It suggests that learning is a process of bringing component parts together, in different ways. Architecture is a kind of large-scale building set. Imagine the wooden blocks that children play with, learning about balance through pleasure as towers topple and bridges give way; this is Bauspiel, playing with form.
This is how pots fit together too. You learn to be a potter here by throwing elements and joining them to make objects. A teapot needs a spout, a body, a lid, lugs for a handle, but, says the ceramics master, they can be like this, or like this.
Lucia Moholy photographs these pots – greys and whites and blacks – in graphic combinations, on the edge of a table. Everything returns to the image. The world is to be rearranged, played with in order to find the most dynamic way that objects and rooms and buildings and people can work.
What are the potters doing here? Is it a laboratory or is it an art school or is it a factory? We must find, writes Gropius after examining their pots, ‘some way of duplicating some of the articles with the help of machines’.
The Bauhaus potters are making vessels by hand that yearn to look like pots made by machines. The designer, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, clever and astute across glass and metal, was rueful: ‘dealers and manufacturers laughed over our products … Although they looked like cheap machine production, they were in fact expensive handicrafts.’
This hurts. And the cheap/expensive uppercut rings true.
In the revolutionary Bauhaus, you make your pots with definition and hard angles and you glaze them with clean glazes to catch an aura of the machine. You do this because repetition is the rhythm and the pulse of the moment.
‘We don’t live in a time when the cultural face is determined by ceramics,’ writes a critic with asperity in the magazine Die Form. ‘The preferred material of the 1930s is not clay but metal … concrete and architectural glass.’
Or a white material that is clean, barely clay. Porzellan is the coming material.
ii
You want the most modern vessel? Open Die Form in 1930 and there is Marguerite Friedlander’s porcelain for the Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur in Berlin. She is a young potter, trained at the Bauhaus, and this is her first industrial commission. It is stacked as if it has just been taken from the kiln and it stacks beautifully. And by the side, is a photograph of distilling vessels and a mortar.
All porcelain aspires to this, returns to this. You need the clean severity of the chemist’s bench, the grammar of the alchemist, to make your porcelain. Here is Tschirnhaus again, and his need for crucibles for his experiments, Wedgwood giving away his porcelain retorts to colleagues at the Royal Society, William Cookworthy making mortars for apothecaries in his Coxside Works in Plymouth.
‘There will always be a need for mortars.’
When Philip Johnson curated Machine Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1934, this is what he chose. He displayed capsules used for drying or incinerating chemicals from the Coors Porcelain Co. In the catalogue he gave the prices. They cost from fifteen cents up to twenty-five cents. ‘In spirit, machine art and handicraft are diametrically opposed. Handicraft implies irregularity, picturesqueness, decorative value and uniqueness … The machine implies precision, simplicity, smoothness, reproducibility.’
Johnson, just back from his tour of the Third Reich, wants ‘vases as simple as laboratory beakers’.
iii
And in the Third Reich this is possible.
The first exhibition celebrating a vision for the new Germany opens in Berlin on 21 April 1934. It is called Deutsches Volk, Deutsche Arbeit – German People, German Labour. It has been designed in part by Mies van der Rohe and his partner, the designer and architect Lilly Reich.
You enter up shallow steps. The columns to the building are the handles of four gigantic sledgehammers, twenty metres high. A cog holds the swastika on the roof above you. Inside the building is a spectacle of machinery, pistons, the engine of a train. There are vast images of German workers pouring steel, men deep in mines, women in endless fields of wheat. This is the theatre of materials, resources, possibilities, of people extending into a future. There is a wall of salt. The cover of the catalogue shows a circlet of whitened oak leaves.
The exhibition celebrates work and work is about repetition and repetition is what saves the individual, brings you towards the perfect oblivion of the collective good.
And Lilly Reich, given the brief to display ceramics, installs thousands of undecorated porcelain vessels. They are stacked deeply and they are stacked high. Nothing is out of place. There are hundreds of bowls, thousands of cups, thousands of plates. It is a parade of objects, as white as the tunics of the gymnasts, twisting in perfect synchronicity in the new, white-columned stadia from Leni Riefenstahl’s films.
Reich calls her installation Bright Earth, Fired Earth. German earth is transfigured through fire, ‘reduced by fire to purity’.
Chapter sixty
what whiteness, what candor
i
I love Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s work. There is a lamp he designed early on at the Bauhaus that is a poetic balance of sphere and column. And his Kubus range of stacking glass containers from 1938, perfect for a refrigerator, are Bauspiel in themselves, useful and concise in the use of materials. They sold them in the MOMA store in New York in their expensive classics section. I’m wondering about him and if he made porcelain. And a vase, a bit too full to be totally beautiful, comes up on the screen of my laptop. And Allach.
It is not the name of a factory I know, so I google it.
It is in Dachau, near Munich.
ii
The thing about research is that you go down a road – mining regulation in Cornwall or shipwrecked porcelain – and it goes nowhere and that is three days of your working life, and you turn round to trudge back, kicking stones.
But I’m intrigued and buy a book on this Allach porcelain.
Buying a book is my default holding position. It arrives a week later, a small black hardback with a photo of a porcelain statue of Athena on the front. It is in English, published by Tony L. Oliver, from a suburban street in Egham, Surrey, in 1970.
It was the unique circumstances that prevailed in Germany in 1934 that made it possible for the very best Artists, Designers, Potters and all persons associated with the manufacture of fine porcelain, to be taken from the many world-famous factories that existed in Germany at that time, such as Dresden, Berlin, Rosenthal etc., and be employed at the previously unknown factory at Allach. It was this unique concentration of talent made available for its production that enabled Allach porcelain to be of such a high quality, and consequently highly desirable.
The back flap lists books and colour postcards of Uniforms of the SS.
And I open it up and Illustration No. 1 is a photograph of Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler ‘examining with apparent approval, a selection of Allach porcelain figures. 1943.’ The figures look like eighteenth-century Meissen. Hitler is smiling, avid.
Concentration of talent is hard. They were made in the camp at Dachau.
iii
The story begins in 1935 at Lindenstrasse 8 in Allach, a suburb to the north-west of Munich, with three committed members of the SS. They are the painter Franz Nagy, the sculptor Theodor Kärner, and the artist Carl Diebitsch. They build a small factory attached to a suburban villa. The plan is to create porcelain worthy of the party.
The plan quickly comes to the notice of Himmler who arranges for a substantial capital infusion of 45,000 Reichsmarks from his personal office. The PMA, the P
orzellan Manufaktur Allach, is founded. Himmler believes in art for every German home, but ‘first of all in the homes of my SS men’. Having his own porcelain factory would give him control, allow him to show off his cultural reach, raise money for the causes he holds dear. One of these is the German Winter Relief, the official NSDAP charity founded by Hitler after he was appointed chancellor. This charity has enormous kudos in the party.
‘20 million porcelain soldiers on the march’ is the slogan for March 1938, as Allach sells porcelain soldiers and little porcelain badges with soldiers on them to raise money for impoverished, loyal citizens of the Reich. It is the week of the Anschluss, when German soldiers marched across the border into Austria to be met by delirious crowds.
An article, August und die Porzellansoldaten, Augustus and the Porcelain Soldiers, is published at the same time. It tells the story of King Augustus the Strong and his passion for porcelain and how he traded a whole ‘porcelain regiment’ of dragoons for a set of vast blue-and-white vases. It goes on to emphasise that this regiment fought in the Battle of Kesseldorf for Prussia and that it defeated the Austrian army.
iv
Having your own porcelain factory allows you to give gifts.
In Himmler’s SS there were interminable rites of gift-giving. Alfred Rosenberg, the theoretician of the party, was hard at work creating new rituals, new arcana to embed the people in their culture: Christmas became Julfest, an ersatz Nordic winter celebration, with sacred fire and candles and music.
So Allach makes Julleuchter, Jul-lanterns to sit on the festive tables and glow as the family celebrates the new year, the new start for their country.
And birthdays, and weddings, and the birth of a child to SS members – some of whom would become Himmler’s godchildren – all warrant presents of Allach porcelain. And there are porcelain bowls for presentation at the party rallies at Nuremberg, sporting medals, plaques to celebrate the Anschluss, a presentation vase to Hitler for his fiftieth birthday in 1939, huge white vases for the niches of the Chancellery. Who could have foreseen such demand for porcelain?
The factory in Allach becomes too small and at the end of 1940 it moves to Dachau concentration camp.
There are many advantages of having the factory here.
There is the immediate gain of using the prisoners. The Allach Porcelain Factory – as with the porcelain manufactory in Meissen – is losing skilled workers to the Eastern Front, and here they can draw on inmates. The few prisoners brought in from the camp in 1941 grow to over a hundred by 1943: ‘since the summer we have tried to cover the loss of skilled workers who we’ve lost through the war by supplying our factory with prisoners, and the results in the moulding, forming and glazing departments are äusserst befriedigend, highly satisfying … We are all trying to bring forward the factory, even with all the difficulties of war, so that we can stand proudly in front of our comrades in the fields.’
Himmler inspecting Allach porcelain, Dachau, 20 January 1941
And here in Dachau there is the bonus of artistic advice to hand from Frau Eleonore Pohl, the wife of SS-Hauptamtchef Oswald Pohl. She is an artist. He is head of the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA) that manages all the economic and financial activities of the SS. This includes concentration camps.
And Himmler has his own factory that he can bring his fellow SS officers to, walk along the benches, peer over the prisoners’ shoulders and enquire and inspect. When they visit Dachau, the factory is the first place on the tour. Johannes Heesters, the most famous entertainer in Germany, is given a tour, given gifts. There is a visitor’s book.
There they all are, picking up figurines, comparing things.
They turn them over, as you are supposed to do, and underneath is the mark that says Allach and the symbol is the double lightning Sig of the SS. Cleverly, it is also the Meissen mark of the two swords transposed.
Everyone is happy with this arrangement of Allach as a semi-autonomous company, and there are promotions and Kärner is given the honorary rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer and an honorary professorship on Hitler’s birthday. And Diebitsch, who is kept hard at work designing the new regalia, the badges and kit, the flags, scabbards and caps that are so important to the particularity of the SS, becomes an Obersturmbannführer in the Waffen SS.
It is a company that is run with precision. The accounts are accurate. The numbers of the figures are filed meticulously. Himmler takes forty-five per cent of the output of the factory, sometimes paying. And in 1942, when there is a typhoid epidemic amongst the prisoners in Dachau, Himmler asks for payment for those who have died.
v
Himmler wanted his Allach to make objects that were künstlerisch wertvolle – artistically worthwhile – not degenerating into kitsch. The director of the State Porcelain Gallery in Dresden, Professor Dr Paul Fichter, in charge of all Augustus’ porcelain collection, oversees the designs of Allach and this gives the company more gravitas. His name, with his titles, goes on the base of some products. Professor Wagenfeld, currently attached to the glass factory at Lausitzer, is also to give advice.
Deutsch sein heisst klar sein. ‘To be German, is to be clear’, said Hitler.
To be clear is to be skilled and to tell stories well, not to obfuscate. Degenerate art is unskilled, merely sketched, inept. It is unclear. Hitler knows what he wants. He wants to see skill.
If you want to impress the Führer, that is all you have to do.
So Allach makes a porcelain stallion, leaping upwards, tail flowing, powerful and independent, a leader &c., &c.
Himmler's birthday gifts to Hitler of Allach figurines, Berlin, 20 April 1944
Allach porcelain is ‘a kind of billboard for the SS’s cultural representation’, wrote the head of Himmler’s personal staff.
Only highly valued, artistic porcelain was produced, so distinguished that it overcame the greatest technological difficulties. These consisted in producing a figurine horse with one rider supported only by the two thin legs of the horse without the usual support of the heavy body of the horse under the belly with an allegorical tree trunk, branch or flower. Even the other famous German manufacturers like Meissen, Nymphenburg, and so forth, could not manage these technical achievements! It was the will of the Reichsführer-SS.
So there. Himmler manages what Augustus the Strong could never do, through will.
And Hitler, having seen what Allach is capable of, orders the special production of a hundred figures of Friedrich der Grosse zu Pferd, Frederick the Great on Horseback. He keeps one in his office in the Chancellery. He gives the others to those who have impressed him with their dedication to the purity of the Reich.
vi
And there is more skill, more clarity.
Look at the modelling on the porcelain bears, the stags and does and fawns, the fox cubs, dachshunds and alsatians. The puppies are so expressive. The Reclining Stag by Professor T. Kärner is wary, every muscle quivering to take flight. This is a German bestiary with animals to cosset or animals to hunt.
There are stags of this splendour in the deer park on the southern border of the Dachau camp, just beyond the barbed-wire fences and watchtowers, carefully corralled to be shot from the lodge, after dinner with the commandant.
And then there are the statues of the young and perfect: maidens after the bath, mothers with children, champions, striding female nudes, a Hitler youth in shorts banging on a drum, eyes on the future, noisy, and a Bund Deutscher Mädel, a member of the League of German Girls, with pigtails framing her face, left foot forward. There is a run of flying officers in full uniform with swords, and a figurine of a pilot, straight from the cockpit, nonchalant, and an SS rider and an SS standard-bearer. ‘The Standard-Bearer wears a nicely detailed SA-SS gorget’, says the book for collectors. The standard-bearer is not shown in the stores and is in the personal gift of Himmler.
And then there is the SS storm trooper.
Count von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador to London, buys these to give to those
in society he feels understand the complexity of the Reich. An Allach porcelain storm trooper ends up on the mantelpiece of the marquess of Londonderry’s house in Ulster.
The most desired of all these figures was a muscled youth, shirtless, leaning on his epée, Die Fechter, The Fencer. It was given only to the elite in the party. And I find a formal portrait of Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference in 1942 that formalised plans for the Holocaust. He was, said Hitler approvingly, ‘the man with the iron heart’, responsible for the Einsatzgruppen, the death squads that killed a million Jews.
He was a fencer. Die Fechter sits on a table next to him, a white trophy, ‘an Omen in the Bone / Of Death’s Tremendous Nearness’.
vii
Das Schwarze Korps, the SS newspaper, records the opening of the new Allach store in Berlin at Leipzigstrasse 13, on 1 April 1939. It quotes Hitler. He had proclaimed, as he saw these porcelains, that ‘Kein Volk lebt länger als die Dokumente seiner Kultur’. No people live longer than the document of their culture.
‘These words of the Führer are a cultural motto for us. We know that all we may produce will be critically examined by those who come after us, and we do not want these later generations to give a poor verdict on our works.’
The new store is very smart indeed with a pair of huge windows flanking the entrance and wall sconces to light it up at night and ALLACH above the door. Das Schwarze Korps for the following week takes you inside where there are vitrines to the right with spotlit figures.
The photograph shows Himmler as he walks past these glass cases, hands behind his back, reviewing his dragooners.
And in 1941 and 1942, as the army pushed east, stores for Allach were opened in the new cities of the Reich, Warsaw, Poznan´ and Lwów, now called Lemberg.
The Julfest plate for 1943 sent to leading members of the SS shows pink crocuses emerging from a snowy earth. On the back is a facsimile of Pohl’s signature surrounded by a circlet of runes. On 14 January 1943, Himmler writes to Oswald Pohl that he has visited the Allach store in Poznan´: ‘In Allach we had a very pretty eagle in clay, matt. And now I see this eagle in the store in Poznan´ glazed! It looks disgraceful. I request that this is changed immediately.’ It can’t be too difficult, surely, to send him the first porcelain sample which is produced and ask his opinion. And the staff are too young. They shouldn’t work in such visible positions during the war. ‘I really don’t wish to get annoyed about one of the few things that give me pleasure.’
The White Road Page 28