And the Allach Porcelain Factory had been cleared. The moulds had disappeared. There were a few models left, but none of Nazi figures, none of the incriminating models of white storm troopers.
iv
In early 1947, the porcelain factory Oscar Schaller & Co. in Windischeschenbach started to produce a range of porcelain animals, bear cubs, horses, puppies, young fauns, Bambi. Pick them up and look at the base and they say Eschenbach Germany–US Zone. And above this is the name of the modeller Kärner.
SS-Hauptsturmführer Kärner became Herr Kärner. He had buried the ‘tainted’ porcelain in the last few days before liberation, taken the moulds and started again. There were no SS runes, but the models were the same.
In Nuremberg on 17 September 1947, the defence of Oswald Pohl, director of the WVHA, made its closing statement against his indictment on war crimes and crimes against humanity. The prosecution stated that 10 million people had been imprisoned in the camps of the WVHA, that millions had died.
He was found guilty and sentenced to death. He appealed and then appealed again. He wrote a book Credo: My Way to God about his conversion to the Christian faith. He was personally not guilty of any crimes: ‘I had never beaten anyone to death, nor did I encourage anyone to do so.’ Credo was published with support from the Catholic Church, who asked for amnesty on Pohl. It included illustrations by his wife Eleonore, the adviser on standards of artistic quality to Allach porcelain. One of her images showed a pensive figure in deep contemplation in a prison cell. Pohl was executed on 8 June 1951, still protesting his innocence and his faith.
The new models of characteristic German animals from the Eschenbach porcelain factory were collected in the new German Democratic Republic with avidity.
v
The German Democratic Republic is formed on 7 October 1949. In Dresden crowds celebrate in Theaterplatz, surrounded by the blank windows of ruins. The new flag hangs from lamp posts. The city is skeletal, the roads clear and empty. There is no rebuilding, but there is renaming. The Augustus Bridge across the Elbe has become the Georgi-Dimitroff-Brücke, named after a Bulgarian communist. There are reparations. A woman recalls working ‘on the pile of rubbish … cleaning up the bricks. And then we had to dismantle the railroad – that was material for reparations, the tracks and wood ties.’ Silent men from Siberia look on to make sure the Germans don’t slacken.
The aspirations of the new state are great. First Secretary Ulbricht announces that there is to be a huge boulevard cutting its way through the rubble of Berlin. The populace will clear this with optimism and self-sacrifice. Stalin-Allee is to house workers and shops, and the facades are to be tiled in Meissen porcelain, with bas-relief panels of sheaves of corn and other easily legible symbols. The whole street is a white scimitar of modernity.
To celebrate Stalin’s seventieth birthday there is a party in Moscow. There is a photograph of Mao and Ulbricht flanking the Leader. The Russian State Porcelain Factory makes a white porcelain model of Stalin and Mao in an edition of three. The two senior leaders sit on a sofa with tassels, comfortable in their shared vision of Red East.
And though there weren’t many films made in 1949 in the GDR in the chilly aftermath of the war – a dozen or so – Die Blauen Schwerter, The Blue Swords is released. It is the most expensive production that year, with a considerable investment in props and costumes.
Augustus is vast, dressed in brocades and lace, the alchemist hero Johann Friedrich Böttger is lean and goodlooking. The climacteric is in the vaults, the kiln a monster of flames and smoke, with Böttger shouting that he needs more heat, breaking up the chairs to feed its maw, sweat pouring off him, as Augustus prowls, possibly wearing a crown.
Böttger pulls the saggar from the kiln and plunges it into a barrel of water – ‘my porcelain will not break’ – and opens it to reveal a lattice-ware bowl of white. It is placed in the king’s hands, he looks at it, feels it, taps it to hear it, and then turns it over. There is the cipher, the two blue crossed swords of Meissen.
Somehow, complicatedly, the worker has triumphed.
vi
The GDR is tiny, as well as poor. But it has a strong filial relationship with China, vast and poor.
There is a joke. Mao and Walter Ulbricht, the poker-faced head of the GDR with his Lenin-Lite goatee beard, are comparing how many of their populations oppose them. ‘Seventeen million!’ says Mao. ‘Me too!’ responds Ulbricht, happily.
As the Soviet Union is sending experts in dams and steel construction, Ulbricht needs to keep his end up and he decides to send technical helpers, experts, to China.
In 1955, the GDR sends experts in its own strong field of porcelain. Workers from Meissen travel to help the workers of Jingdezhen create new porcelain.
Chapter sixty-three
correct in orientation
i
It feels like the start of another East German joke.
Do you know the one about the worker who got the chance to get away? And he went to Jingdezhen?
Jingdezhen was as grey as Potsdam. The pollution from the coal-fired kilns was so bad that in summer it felt autumn and in winter, it was perpetual dusk.
The National Institute of Ceramic Art was started in the glow of East German cooperation in 1955. It was closed in 1959 when the East Germans slipped away after Mao split with Khrushchev. They left the museum half built.
What gifts do you bring your wife back from Jingdezhen in your cardboard suitcase, if you are given a couple of days’ notice, are in a hurry to return?
ii
In 1958 and unhappy with the progress of the Five Year Plan, Mao launches the Great Leap Forward. The new party slogan is ‘more, quicker, better, cheaper’. In Jingdezhen, this means the reorganisation of factories into ten state-run and four large city-run ones and a change of emphasis to utilitarian wares and porcelain conductors for electricity. Only the Sculpture Factory and Art Porcelain Factory could produce other kinds of porcelain.
Terrifying output projections were plucked from the air. The expectation was to double production within two years and overtake Britain in steel production within ten. Control of quality went. ‘There is no such thing as a reject product, one man’s reject is another man’s grain’, Mao was quoted as saying.
So once again you trace the waves of the campaigns through what is made and what is not made, chart each moment of the shifts in policy.
This porcelain plaque from the Great Leap Forward shows peasants on a commune, happily working away from their fields at a smelter making useless steel by melting down useful tools.
This child banging a metal pan means 1958 and the Four Pests Campaign, the attempt to destroy all rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. Sparrows were to be scared from landing until they dropped from the skies.
This figure is of Lei Feng, a People’s Liberation Army guard killed in an accident in 1962. He left behind diaries revealing his devotion to Mao and was instantly canonised in the Learn from Comrade Lei Feng campaign.
You pick up a plate of a perfect snowy scene of early morning, workers on their way to a factory as shiny as a new Jerusalem, and turn it over: Made in Jingdezhen, World-shaking New Atmosphere, Yu Wnxiang made this at Zhushan in autumn of 1964. So this is made during the Socialist Education Campaign, when model factories were praised and held up as exemplars. Zhushan, I suddenly remember, is Pearl Hill, the site of the imperial porcelain factory.
Images pass, as brief as barked slogans.
Mao is clear about the purpose of art: ‘Writers and artists should study society, that is to say, they should study the various classes in society, their mutual relations and respective conditions, their physiognomy and their psychology. Only when we grasp all this clearly can we have a literature and art that is rich in content and correct in orientation.’
Correct is an alarming word to hear. Not correct comes the echo back.
iii
On 1 May 1966, at the International Labour Day rally, Mao announces the Great Proleta
rian Cultural Revolution. With the help of youth, the ‘four olds’ are to be destroyed: old customs, old habits, old culture and old thinking.
Jingdezhen is a city steeped in the four olds.
Making porcelain is an old in itself. The senior masters were dragged on to the streets to face humiliation, one was beaten, caged and hauled through the town, several committed suicide. A plaque painted fifty years earlier is daubed with ‘Revolution is not a crime / Sweeping Away the Four Olds / Revolt is Correct’. Houses are ransacked and workshops are destroyed. Factories close as workers are sent to work in the countryside.
What can you make in a city terrorised by young Red Guards? A junior lecturer attempted to save some of his senior masters by gathering them together and establishing a workshop to paint revolutionary images on to porcelain. They were given basic subsistence but were expected to paint from dusk until dawn seven days a week to exorcise old thinking.
With Jiang Qing, Madame Mao, as director of propaganda, images are controlled with ferocity.
Imagine an over-fired image of the Leader, the Red Star running down the vase. Imagine dropping a statue.
Jingdezhen survived through Mao. His sayings were transcribed on to cups so that you could warm your hands on his words. In the summer of 1966, the first Mao badges were created in Shanghai. By the start of autumn they were ubiquitous, presented by work units, bought from propaganda shops, exchanged in their tens of millions. By the end of the year you could be challenged if you didn’t wear a badge. At the start of 1968 the Jingdezhen factories began serious production; ceramic badges could be made both in vast quantities and more cheaply than in metal. But stories began to circulate. Chipped images of the Leader, a porcelain badge dropped in a jostling street, its owner forced to his knees in atonement.
On 12 June 1969, the Central Committee published Certain questions to pay attention to concerning the propagation of Chairman Mao’s image in which it was declared that creating porcelain badges was prohibited. But the need for statues of Mao kept increasing. There was the ‘official ware’ bust – the only sculptured image to be distributed to all official buildings throughout China – and there are a lot of official buildings in China.
They were made of high-fired porcelain with a colourless glaze, only a few inches high, and showed an implacable Mao, jowly, his mouth set firmly against almost everything.
This whiteness is pragmatic, cutting away the fear of mistakes in the creation of these icons. This whiteness made them glow as transcendently as any goddess of mercy, any Guanyin. The emperor Yongle, builder of the porcelain pagoda, merciless, would have understood.
Chapter sixty-four
another witness
i
I have two final witnesses. They are both makers of Mao.
Mr Yang. In his sixties. He drinks tea. Lives in Jingdezhen just inside the gate of the Sculpture Factory with his wife. His workshop is four rooms filled from floor to ceiling with Maos. An athletic Mao having swum the Yellow River supported by joyful peasants, a Mao brandishing the Little Red Book, Mao presenting mangos that he had been given by a Pakistani delegation to a group of workers. More bulky, coated Maos than you can believe; I think how simple it is to use a greatcoat is if you are uncertain on proportions.
I ask him how long he has lived here and he says that he was at high school, only fifteen, when the Cultural Revolution started and they behaved ‘badly’ to their teachers but ‘not too badly’. And he adds that he was a Red Guard which means that he knew how to sculpt uniforms properly; he is good on uniforms. He shows me his statue of the teacher, in her spectacles, with her dunce’s cap – the sign of a rightist, class traitor. She is sitting on a stool, humiliated. He is good on these details, too.
As we talk he settles himself a little, lights up.
He talks me through the decades. The poisonous politics of each diktat, of the control of the commissioners, of the three officials in the factory that became nine, the way that in the 1980s – if you were a party member – you could get your cousins on to the payroll. In the 1990s, the banks stopped lending to the collectives. The state porcelain factory went under in 1995. Half the city lost work.
I ask him about the market. Pandas, popular in the late Mao period, disappeared for a decade and roar back at the end of the 1980s. Mao has been surprisingly steady, he says, though the centenary of Mao’s birth in 1993 was a high-water mark, the best year ever. Small statues of President Deng Xiaoping, plates with his face hovering like an old planet over the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, had their moment too, but he didn’t get into making them, though he can tell me who did, if I’m interested.
Workers making plaques of Mao, Heilongjiang Province, 1968
I watch the carrier pick up the newly glazed Maos to take to the packing factory. And on to Shanghai to the shops where you can buy a Long March poster, something retro from the Cultural Revolution for your new apartment, high up in the grey air.
ii
Master Lieu. In his seventies. I interviewed him for two hours. We drank tea.
He has very, very long fingers that fly around as he talks and his eyes are hazel and wry. He lives in a courtyard around fruit trees in the Sculpture Factory, where he has been since 1963, as student, apprentice, sculptor, manager, director and survivor. He knows it all.
This was a hill, he says to me, with a few artisans, when it was deemed the Sculpture Factory in 1955. When you left school or college, people were told which factory to join and ‘because I could use a brush I was told to come here’. He didn’t want to come. Conditions were terrible but he found it was a good place to learn how to make sculpture as there was always someone making an ox or Buddha.
And then there was the Cultural Revolution. He holds his right arm steady with his left. His daughter sits next to him and waits.
We were told to break our own moulds and we then broke them, thousands of them, all the classical figures of Guanyin and Confucius and the poets. The moulds were old – back to the Qing. Red Guards watched us doing it, checked the factory to make sure none were left. The factory was a wasteland. And we were turned into a latex-glove factory. They needed gloves. But they needed Mao more! So four or five of us were told to do models. We had to be very careful. They were very worried: no one wanted to get it wrong.
Someone has produced a large photograph of Master Lieu next to his sculpture and slips it on to the desk between us.
And this is my Mao, he says.
It is the famous model of Mao, glazed in a soft white glaze, rare, collected. The Leader is young and tall. He is wearing sandals, one foot slightly raised on a rock, and his left hand holds an unfolding map. He looks engaged, and I realise that the reason this sculpture works, while thousands of others are choked by their symbolism, is that it is a sort of self-portrait. This is Lieu as Mao, a young man off to gain the respect of the world.
‘I also made this,’ he continues, producing a model of an old farmer with an avuncular arm around a young woman learning to sow seed on a swirling green patch of ground. They are both barefooted in the good Chinese earth. I’m so distracted by the rather fetching check shirt the woman is wearing – she looks like a 1950s grad student, liberal arts – that I miss my chance to ask him about Chinese earth. I ask him who worked with him and he mentions the man who sits near the box-making factory washing chopsticks all day. He was a professor who painted here, but was sent to a village for re-education.
I’ve seen this man. He writes slogans in chalk on the walls and washes them away, starts again. The restaurant gives him rice. He is a survivor, of sorts. And another witness.
Chapter sixty-five
The Boehm Porcelain Co. of Trenton, New Jersey
So I hear this joke.
What do you bring to China? What do you give an emperor?
It is 1972. You cannot bring maps, or chiming clocks, or telescopes, or perspective. A piece of moon rock brought by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Mao on an earlier visit was met with disdai
n.
So President Nixon brings a pair of Alaskan musk oxen and a Californian redwood tree.
And porcelain.
He brings a sculpture of a pair of mute swans with their cygnets, three feet long and three feet high, made by the Boehm Porcelain Co. of Trenton, New Jersey. Boehm specialised in accurate representations of birds in porcelain, ‘a medium in which one can portray the everlasting beauty of form and colour of wildlife and nature’. They have a brass plaque attached to their oak base explaining that they are a gift to His Excellency Chairman Mao Tse-tung and the people of the People’s Republic of China &c.
It is tribute, of course. No different from those centuries of sending white stallions or coffers of gold, strange vases of a white material, translucent.
President Nixon flies back to America with a pair of pandas, Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, leaving behind a fudged declaration on the status of Taiwan and his own imperial porcelain, Nixonware.
Coda
London – New York – London
Chapter sixty-six
breathturn
i
I’m writing this at my table in the studio. It is all so clean. It is still early so that there is no one else here yet. I’ve walked the dog and now I’m quiet, with a glass of water and a blank sheet of paper. The light refracts across the white walls.
There are the places I haven’t got to. And things I haven’t read.
I know I should really get to grips with Goethe.
Wittgenstein wrote a response to Goethe’s response to Newton on colour. I should get to his house in Vienna. He designed it slowly. So slowly that everyone he worked with gave up and moved on. It was an impossible house to live in, the house of a philosopher who started each sentence with a query.
The White Road Page 30