The invention and uses of folk art in Germany: wooden toys from the Erzgebirge mountains

Folklore, April, 2004 by Manuel Schramm

Abstract

This article attempts to historicise the concept of "folk art" using the example of wooden toys from the Erzgebirge mountains to show that it was invented by cultural elites as a marketing concept at the beginning of the twentieth century in order to support a domestic industy caught in structural crisis.

Introduction

Today the Erzgebirge mountains are situated on both sides of the German-Czech border. In the German part that belongs to the state of Saxony, wooden toys have been produced since the eighteenth century. [1] Historians and ethnographers have often explained the emergence of this home industry in terms of the "healthy roots" [2] of folk art in that area (Bilz 1970, 37). Ethnographer Manfred Bachmann presents its development in the late nineteenth century as a story of decline. He praises the variety of forms in the folk art of the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, whereas, in his view, the toy production turned away from "real folk art" during the late nineteenth century (Bachmann 1989, 69). Ethnographer Konrad Auerbach recently criticised this view and claimed that the folk art of wood carving in the west of the Erzgebirge mountains remained separate from the commercial toy production further east (Auerbach 1995b, 8). The research presented here suggests a third point of view: the toy production in the Erzgebirge did not simply grow out of folk art nor did they both exist separately, but the concept of folk art from the Erzgebirge was invented at the beginning of the twentieth century as a reaction to a deep crisis in the toy industry. Here, folk art did not give birth to the toy industry; the toy industry (or rather its crisis) gave birth to folk art. This article thus gives an example of what ethnographer Gottfried Korff has termed folk art as ideological construct (Korff 1992). It also aims to show how the concept of folk art could be used for commercial and very different political purposes throughout the twentieth century. To avoid misunderstandings: my point is not that the concept of folk art originated in the Erzgebirge and spread from there. Rather, this is but one example for developments occurring throughout Germany and probably Europe. In Germany, a discussion among intellectuals about folk art began in the 1890s in the context of applied arts reform, but the meaning of the term folk art was different from the one used later, because it included only objects produced for personal consumption and not for wider markets (Deneke 1964).

Economic Development

The toy industry of the Erzgebirge was a typical proto-industrial home industry based on the technologies of wood turning and carving. During the second half of the nineteenth century it sank into a deep crisis. The number of employees fell from an estimated 10,000 in 1869 to 8500 in 1895 and 5200 in 1907 (Meyer 1911, 12-5). The number of lathes in the principal centre of this industry, the town of Seiffen, fell from seventy-three in 1884 to nine in 1904 (HSTA MfW 70, 2-8). Particularly in the 1880s and 1890s, falling prices for their products caused great social distress among the toy makers (Bilz 1975). Chair building replaced toy making in towns like Dittersbach and Neuhausen. The crisis had several reasons: first, the entrepreneurs were able to lower wages through the contracting-out system. Second, the demand for wooden toys fell because they had to compete with more modern metal toys. Third, wood prices increased at the same time and, fourth, in the years preceding World War I a new competitor on the world market of wooden toys emerged: Japan. The Japanese export of wooden toys grew from 1 million yen or 2 million Reichsmark (RM) to 1.9 million yen or RM 3.9 million in 1911. The total production value of Erzgebirge toys was an estimated RM 10 million in 1913, more than one-half of which was exported (HSTA MfW 114, 71 and 97). Japan was an especially serious competitor because her toys resembled those from the Erzgebirge. Indeed, German entrepreneurs often complained about imitations of their products by Japanese firms. During World War I and the first years thereafter, the Japanese exports made further inroads, especially into the British and American markets. Export figures for the latter market increased from $0.4 million in 1914 to $5.6 million in 1920, but fell again to $0.2 million in 1923 (Schelling 1935, 30). Japan then disappeared as a competitor for a few years but came back again at the beginning of the 1930s, when her toy exports increased from 0.4 million yen in 1931 to more than 2 million yen or RM 1.6 million in 1933 (Winkler 1935, 81). If these figures are correct, this would mean that in 1933 Japan overtook the Erzgebirge in the export of wooden toys for the first time, the export value of the latter being an estimated RM 1.5 million (Zenker 1935, 189). From the mid-1920s onwards competition came also from the Bohemian Erzgebirge, just a few miles to the south across the German-Czech border. The Czechoslovakian export grew from about RM 2 million in 1926 to RM 2.7 million in 1928, falling to RM 1.5 million in 1932 (Winkler 1935, 76). Another problem was the introduction of new tariffs by importing countries. The United States raised the tariff on toys from 35% to 70% in 1922, and Great Britain introduced a tariff of 25% in 1932 (Schelling 1935, 32; Winkler 1935, 56). Yet during the inflation period of 1919-23 the Erzgebirge toy industry did well, but ran into trouble with the stabilisation of the German Reichsmark in 1923-4. The situation got better towards the end of 1926. In 1925 there were still 4108 persons employed in that industry, the production value of which was about RM 15 million by 1927. With the onset of economic depression, however, it had fallen to about RM 6 million by 1933 (Schelling 1935, 17; Zenker 1935, 189). After 1933 the new national socialist government introduced job schemes, and schools were admonished to use wooden toys and decorations from the Erzgebirge for their Christmas celebrations. It is hard to estimate how effective these measures were, but the number of employees in the toy and musical instrument industries in Saxony as a whole increased from 8907 in 1933 to 17,398 in 1939. The small enterprise "Leichsenring" in Seiffen increased its number of employees from four to twenty during the same period (Grosche 1995, 12).