Hummel Figurines : Molding a Collectible Germany

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2001 6: 49Journal of Material CultureJohn C haimov

Hummel Figurines : Molding a Collectible Germany

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HUMMEL FIGURINESMolding a Collectible Germany

JOHN CHAIMOV

Department of Foreign Languages, Coe College, Iowa, USA

AbstractHow are we to understand the many-stranded, even contradictory, ways anartifact projects an ethnic image across the space of the contact zone? Astaple of souvenir shops in German-American tourist towns and the focusof an entire museum in Texas, diminutive porcelain Hummel figurines havebeen selling an image of Germany to a world audience since their appear-ance in 1935. Various entities – corporate, civic, national – have sought tocontrol or exploit the ethnic image that Hummels carry, molding them intowhat one might call ‘ideological souvenirs’. But what ideologies do they sell,what messages of ethnicity do they convey? Strategic efforts to deployHummels as ideological souvenirs run up against shifting historicalconditions and conflicting interpretations of the figurines’ symbolicmeanings. The moving target of historical reception thus exposes thedialectic of image-control and the resilient self-invention of the artifact.

Key Words◆ ethnicity ◆ Heimat ◆ ideology ◆ infantile ◆ souvenir

Watch the official Hummel collectors’ video, hosted by Robert L. Millerand his wife, Ohioans who have amassed the largest private collectionof Hummels anywhere, and you will hear them emphasize the personaldimension of collecting. They bought their first Hummel in the 1950s,they tell, because it reminded them of their children. Their daughter wasslightly taller than their son, just like the children in the figurine, andthey suggest you begin your collection in a similarly personal way(Miller, 1994).

It is easy enough to critique this from the perspective of, say, Veblen(1899) or Bourdieu (1984) by highlighting Mrs Miller’s blindness to her

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social station or to the class-symbolic value that such a collection mayhave. Today Hummels cost hundreds, older ones sometimes thousandsof dollars, and their displayable uselessness is just what Veblen wouldfix on to locate their appropriateness to the leisure class. Indeed, the dis-course of the half dozen or so existing collector’s guides to Hummel fig-urines is very quick to translate the ‘value’ of specific Hummels intocurrent dollar amounts. What attracts me to Mrs Miller’s comment aboutthe figurine resembling her own children is its attention to the figural.She seems highly conscious, in a way that is smokescreened by and itselfsmokescreens the economic orientation of the price guides, that Hummelchildren participate in an allegorical correspondence to real people. ForMrs Miller, they function as part of a domestic, familial imaginary. Likethe fetish value Marx theorizes to describe the mysterious social lifehidden within commodities, Mrs Miller sees in the Hummel figurine avalue divorced from its material substance. Unlike Marx, for whom thefetish value is very much a part of the exchange value of a commodity(see, for example, Pietz, 1993: 130), Mrs Miller is envisioning an extra-economic attachment. She goes well beyond the hackneyed and usuallydisingenuous collector’s mantra, ‘Buy what you like,’ to internalizeHummel children in effect as members of her family. The fact that anAmerican in Ohio can look at lederhosen- and dirndl-clad Hummels andsee, as if in a mirror, her own family, testifies to the power such objectshave to shape the way we perceive other cultures.

This article takes Mrs Miller’s Pygmalion gesture seriously and seeksto analyze some of the ways in which Hummel figurines function asdolls-come-to-life to convey messages of ethnicity, history, politics. Assuch, it takes as its starting point Tony Bennett’s Foucauldian notions ofthe artwork as a sort of medium through which state ideologies are inten-tionally and strategically broadcast to a consuming public. The closerone looks, however, the more one sees proliferating layers of allegory,chance occurrences in history and geography, competing and conflictinginterpretations of the figurines’ symbolic values, and multiple and diver-gent contexts against which ideologues and consumers alike are tounderstand Hummels’ figure-ative meanings. Meanings deployed strate-gically hit their mark in less predictable places. The shifting target of his-torical reception thus makes for a particularly rich inquiry into thedialectic of image-control and the resilient self-invention of the artifact.

INSIDE THE MUSEUM

In 1996 I first visited the Hummel Museum in the German-Americantourist town of New Braunfels, Texas. There are glass cabinets filled withhundreds of the diminutive porcelain figurines. Beyond that, displays oflarge-format pastel drawings that served as the basis for the figurines fill

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an entire floor. On thesecond floor one can seepersonal effects belong-ing to the artist, BertaHummel, and watch avideotape of her life storyin which one learns thatshe was born in Bavariain 1909, studied paintingin the late 1920s at theAcademy of Applied Artsin Munich, and entered aWürttemberg Franciscanconvent in 1931, whereshe later took the veil andthe name Maria Innocen-tia. Her drawings of chil-dren and religious

themes became popular in the early 1930s as calendars and greetingcards, and it was in a Munich card shop in 1933 that Franz Goebel,owner of a Bavarian porcelain factory, saw Hummel’s drawings and hadthe idea of transforming the children she drew into three-dimensionalporcelain figurines.

I was vexed, however, by the persistent awareness that this was apermanent museum located in a small town in Texas and dedicated toan artist who never set foot in the United States (see Figure 1). Why?What is the importance of Hummel figurines in the United States? Mysearch for an answer led me to understand Hummel figurines as whatone might call ideological souvenirs. In a more intense way than an EiffelTower keychain memorializes a trip to Paris the Hummel figurine, in amobile and global but also unstable way, mediates cultures – chieflyGerman and American cultures – so as to serve not just commercial endsbut those of state ideologies.

THE IDEOLOGICAL SOUVENIR

State ideology, and the artistic vehicles through which it is disseminated,form the focus of Tony Bennett’s essay ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’(1996). Blending Gramsci’s analysis of state control over culture andFoucault’s theorizing of disciplinary techniques, Bennett shows howstates discipline citizens with ideologies carried in exhibitions of art,industry, and ethnography. In a shift roughly parallel to that from fixedstage to agitprop, the fixed museum transforms itself into world’s fair:Public museums

Chaimov: HUMMEL F IGUR INE S

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FIGURE 1 Why here? the M. I. HummelMuseum, New Braunfels, TexasPhoto by the author




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provided the modern state with adeep and continuous ideologicalbackdrop but one which, if it wasto play this role, could not beadjusted to respond to shorter-term ideological requirements.Exhibitions met this need,injecting new life into the exhibi-tionary complex and rendering its ideological configurations morepliable . . . [and] mobilizing [them]strategically in relation to themore immediate ideological andpolitical exigencies of the particu-lar moment. (Bennett, 1996: 102)

The ideological souvenir, onemight say, marks the next stage inthe pliability of the state’s disci-plinary strategies. The ideologicalsouvenir, physically transferablefrom German gift shop or domestic antique store into the display caseor curio shelf at home, diffuses across a broad, often international marketarea to become an invisible exhibition, an every-person’s museum.

Hummel figurines were to some extent produced from the beginningfor the American market. Franz Goebel’s father, then owner of the por-celain works, traveled to the US in the 1920s to learn about porcelainmanufacture and, more importantly, to learn about American marketsso that Goebel Porcelain could better tailor their product lines to Ameri-can tastes. Hummel figurines were clearly a part of the company’sresponse. In 1935, when Goebel Porcelain displayed the first 48 figurinesat the Leipzig Trade Fair, Marshall Field department store of Chicagoplaced a large order.

Their commercial viability ultimately only accounted for a portionof their success. States, and particularly the United States, deployedHummels to effect particular ideological ends. On post-war Americanbases, the Post Exchange, or PX, where GIs bought Marlboros andHershey’s chocolate bars, stocked Hummel figurines. A post-war USDepartment of the Army guide book, What to Do in Germany, listed col-lecting Hummel figurines as an ideal pastime for Americans serving inGermany and for their spouses. In fact, every history of Hummel fig-urines, from book-length price guide to thumbnail sketch in the Satur-day Evening Post, will mention the fact that American GIs in post-warGermany were the first mass consumers of Hummels (see Figure 2).

I would like to claim that Hummel figurines sold a particular image


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FIGURE 2 How to consume ethnicimages: a 1970s US Army guidebookto Germany shows civilians in a shopthat sells Hummels




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of Germans and of Germany toAmerican collectors. (Of course,Americans were not the only oneswho consumed this image;Hummels also helped post-warGermans sell an image of them-selves to themselves.)

The broad outlines of thisimage are easy to sketch, for theycontrast rather neatly with the pro-paganda image of the National-Socialist German disseminatedduring the Second World War.Instead of the monumental,muscled body, a Hummel portraysthe miniature body of a delicatechild; instead of munitionsworkers and panzer-drivingsoldiers in a highly industrializedstate, Hummel children live in apastoral world of farm animals andflowers and pedestrian travel. In asimilar vein, instead of Prussianand Ruhrgebiet modernism, anindefinable but nostalgic Bavarianpast. Instead of violence and SocialDarwinism, Hummel childrenoften act out little maudlin ges-tures of kindness. Instead of theNational Socialist religion ofNordic/Teutonic legends, the overtly religious iconography of manyHummels signal a return to traditional, specifically Catholic, Christian-ity (see Figure 3).

PAINTING THE PAST

Of the characteristics that made Hummels appropriate American vehiclesfor a rehabilitated image of Germans, the most important was perhapstheir anti-Nazi pedigree. This pedigree was established first and foremostthrough the life story of Sister Maria Innocentia, which is generally toldas a virtual passion play of suffering at the hands of the Nazis. As part ofthe standardizing (Gleichschaltung) of religious institutions, in 1937 theNazi government began imposing strictures against convents, includinghers, that would eventually lead to expropriation. Not so coincidentally,


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FIGURE 3 Pastoral, pedestrian,nostalgic: the Merry WandererPhoto by Walter Pfeiffer from the book M.I.

Hummel: The Golden Anniversary Album,

© Portfolio Press, 1984. Reproduced by permission

of the publisher




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the collectors’ books relate, MariaInnocentia was first treated in 1938for tuberculosis. After disbandingthe convent and reconstituting it asa repatriation camp, Hummel wasallowed to return and serve in thecapacity of caretaker to the return-ing Reichsdeutsche housed there.She survived the hardships ofwartime but in ever worseninghealth, finally succumbing to tuber-culosis in 1946. Sister Maria Inno-centia’s suffering at the hands ofNazi persecutors offers an intrigu-ing alternative history of theCatholic Church under NationalSocialism to the better knownhistory of high-level pacts betweenthe Vatican and Berlin.

Adding to Hummels’ anti-Nazipedigree are attacks in the Nazipress on Sister Hummel’s draw-ings that occurred at the same timeshe contracted her fatal illness.The journal SA-Mann denounced

her drawings in 1937 and the journal Hochland followed suit in 1938.Entitled ‘Pictorial Heresy,’ the 1938 Hochland article by Alfons Beil (1938:173) disparages what it calls ‘the well-known hydrocephalic little Jesusesand angels of B. Hummel.’ In hydrocephalic infants, cerebrospinal fluidaccumulates in the space between brain and skull, swelling the head andsometimes leading to paralysis or death. By reading representational aes-thetics as pathology (see Figure 4) the author sets Hummel’s religiousdrawings close to the category of ‘degenerate art,’ exhibitions of whichhad begun touring Germany the year before. In the degenerate artshows, painting and sculpture, much of it Expressionist, was ridiculedfor failing to conform to National Socialist ideals of beauty, realism, andhealth. George Mosse (1991: 26) grasps a central aspect of the slipperyconcept ‘degenerate’ when he links the aesthetic of ‘degenerate’ art-works with 19th-century phobias surrounding the supposed pathologyof ‘nervousness’ and its attendant iconography of exhaustion, contor-tions, and grimaces. Demonizing Sister Hummel’s figural style bydescribing it in terms of a medical condition links the art-historicalrhetoric in the Hochland article very strongly to the cultural criticism ofthose who mounted the ‘Degenerate Art’ shows in 1937.


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FIGURE 4 ‘Hydrocephaly’: Naziideologues read style as pathologyPhoto by Walter Pfeiffer from the book M.I.

Hummel: The Golden Anniversary Album,

© Portfolio Press, 1984. Reproduced by permission

of the publisher




In an essay on Emil Nolde, Russell A. Berman (1992: 57) reminds usthat we ought no more affirm an artist just because she or he was criti-cized by the Nazis than we should reject Shakespeare or Goethe simplybecause the Nazis praised them. With this skepticism in hand I’d like tosketch out a few ways in which Hummel figurines have a somewhatmore complicated relation to National Socialism than the tightly con-trolled promotional writing on them allows.

Hydrocephaly aside (a charge leveled at the drawings, not at thefigurines), Hummels share several points of reference with art valuedpositively by Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, and other definers of theNazi aesthetic. Thematically Hummels ran the gamut from sacred tosecular, often reworking the same theme in both registers. One sacredexample shows Jesus surrounded by the lambs that represent himiconographically, while its secular counterpart shows a child goatherdin Bavarian dress surrounded by his flock (see Figure 5). At least interms of its subject, this Hummel is hardly to be distinguished from apainting en-titled ‘Pasture-Idyll’ by J. P. Junghanns in the ‘GreatGerman Art Exhibition’ of 1943, which was reproduced on a mass scalein the Völkische Beobachter (see Figure 6).

Even without this particular example one could claim an affinity


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FIGURE 5 Thematically, some Hummels were not so different from theirThird-Reich contemporariesPhoto by Walter Pfeiffer from the book M.I. Hummel: The Golden Anniversary Album, © Portfolio Press,

1984. Reproduced by permission of the publisher




between the National Socialist idealization of peasant life and the scoresof Hummels dressed in folk costumes and picking apples, happily sweep-ing or washing, or tending geese, sheep, rabbits, chickens, or babies.

The Nazi government prohibited Sister Hummel’s graphic arts pub-lisher, Ars Sacra, from selling her work in greater Germany, althoughGoebel Porcelain was able to produce and sell Hummel figurinesthrough most of the Third Reich, at least until Hitler’s declaration of‘total war’ in 1943 and its attendant streamlining of industry to war-only production. It is unclear whether this discrepancy owes more toGoebel Porcelain’s contributions to the war effort in the form of por-celain insulators for electrical wires and table settings for the army mess


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FIGURE 6 The official Nazi news of 28 June 1943 gives highlights from the‘Great German Art Exhibition’From Facsimile Querschnitt durch den Völkischen Beobachter, Sonia Noller and Hildegard von Kotze, eds.

Munich: Scherz, 1967. Reproduced by permission of Scherz Verlag, Bern




tent or to their savvy selection of motifs for figurines from Hummel’sdrawings (see Figure 7).

Several early Hummels comprise a martial subtheme that bring themclose to themes depicted in Nazi art. The first to appear, in the initial runof figurines displayed at the 1935 Leipzig Trade Fair, was Hummel 20,‘Prayer Before Battle,’ which depicts a would-be boy soldier kneeling inprayer beside a toy battle charger. The following year Goebel Porcelaindebuted Hummels 50 and 55, ‘Volunteers,’ a drummer striding beside aboy playing infantryman with a shouldered rifle, and ‘Saint George,’depicting the well-known dragonslayer and patron saint of soldiers. It isnoteworthy that in 1955 Goebel Porcelain brought out a figurine of thedrummer boy from ‘Volunteers’ but without his gun-toting comrade. Alater Hummel, 332: ‘Soldier Boy,’ depicting an older boy soldier with longpants and a rifle, dates from 1963. It is interesting to read this piece asreflecting the changed status of Germany as an expressly military allyafter it had begun rearming in the mid-1950s. The ‘Saint George’ drawingby Berta Hummel, which actually has much more of the angular, car-toonish look of Nazi illustration art than does the softer, more roundedfigurine, echoes the Nazi self-portrayal in painting and festivals of‘Nordic’ Germans as medieval knights. I do not want to imply any


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FIGURE 7 Was it pieces such as ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ that allowed GoebelPorcelain to continue modeling new Hummels as late as 1943?Photo by Walter Pfeiffer from the book M.I. Hummel: The Golden Anniversary Album, © Portfolio Press,





conscious link between themes in Nazi art and in Hummels. I simplywant to suggest that had these boy warriors and toy soldiers made up agreater portion of the figurine line, Hummels might not have been soeffective in selling a pacified image of Germany in the post-war years.

THE ‘GOOD’ SOUVENIR

Notwithstanding these misgivings about the figurines’ ambiguous settingwithin their Nazi context, Allied ideologues had good reason to use themas a way to sell a likeable Germany. Since I have begun with a thematicanalysis, let me continue with their consumption as images and worktoward the conditions of their production.

Goebel Porcelain had tried before to market figurines modeled afterSister Hummel’s drawings of grown-ups, but they did not sell. Instead,it is the diminutive children for which the Hummel line is known. Meta-phorically, the image of the child serves the same purpose as the peasantpursuits in which the figurines are engaged: they are both reminders ofan earlier time, of primitive origins. Like Oskar Mazerath in GünterGrass’s 1951 novel The Tin Drum, a Hummel figurine is a child that willnever grow up. Also like Oskar, the enduring infancy of the Hummelchild allows it to wander through the political traumas of mid-20th-century Germany free from all responsibility. Unlike Oskar, butimportantly for the national identity it incorporates, the Hummel childwears its character in its wide eyes, full rosy cheeks, and saccharine emo-tions of surprise and serenity. It is all innocence and harmlessness, pre-cisely those qualities that could effect a forgetting of the immediatehistorical past.

A cognate post-war ‘remembering’ of childhood that had the effectof forgetting the Third-Reich past was the aesthetic of Heimat, or Home-land, of which in their own way Hummels are one of the most endur-ing artifacts. Safe, whole, rural, nostalgic, and naive, like the Heimat filmsof the post-war period, Hummels relate in contradictory ways to theirnational past. Celia Appelgate makes the link between Heimat and child-hood explicitly: ‘It [Heimat] brings to mind . . . the restricted and securesociety of a childhood memory’ (1990: 8). As Anton Kaes (1989: 15)argues, Heimat films, whose directors learned their craft at the UFAstudios of the 1930s and 1940s, derive from Nazi ‘blood and soil’ pro-ductions, which glorified rural life. At the same time, they create adreamworld wish-fulfillment of a healthy and ethical Germany thatamounts to, as Kaes phrases it, a ‘flight from memory’ (1989: 10).Hummel figurines’ origins are presumably much further from the NaziPropaganda Ministry, which vetted every UFA film, but they feed thesame ‘amnesiac impulse’ towards a historical ‘childhood’ that RalphWillett (1989: 127) sees pervasively in the post-war period.


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The notion of historical amnesia is particularly ironic when onerecalls that the meaning of the French word souvenir is ‘to remember’.The promotion of amnesiac souvenirs such as Hummels gains greaterclarity when viewed against the backdrop of campaigns against sou-venirs that ‘remembered’ too well. A spate of articles in the domesticpress in late 1947 and early 1948 warned the families of former soldiersabout the dangers of pistols, rifles, sabers, artillery shells, and grenadesbrought home to America from both theaters of war and that may yetcause harm. A bazooka crippled five New Jersey children at a birthdayparty, and a booby-trapped German fountain pen exploded and severelywounded a veteran on Long Island (Neff, 1947: 12). District attorneysfrom Brooklyn and Baltimore blamed souvenir guns from the war forboosting the rate of violent crime in their districts (Paxton, 1948: 12). Inresponse, the government formed a national War Trophies Safety Com-mission to educate the American populace on matters of safety and toencourage collectors to defuse or turn in their dangerous souvenirs.Beyond being a safety crusade, which, in first instance, it doubtless was,the campaign to turn in war trophies can be read ideologically as aneffort – just as World War II enemies were becoming allies in the politi-cal struggle against communism (witness, for example, the scaling backof denazification in late 1947) – to separate Americans from the all-too-insistent identification of Germany with the material culture of war.Hummels made a kinder, gentler souvenir.

Miniatures memorialize a bygone era of handicraft that has beenusurped by a moment of estrangement in an era of industrialized pro-duction. So goes the argument in Susan Stewart’s On Longing (1984), inwhich she offers the example of the miniature toy chair, whose voguearose with the advent of machine-produced furniture to bridge thechasm mass-consumers felt between themselves and the mass-producedcommodity. That Hummels are doubly miniatures – small in stature andyoung in age – lets them participate in this ideological mechanism. Yet,Hummels go beyond this. Even the sleight of hand by which Hummelsask their owners to imagine an idyllic and pastoral past is not as simpleas it seems. In my analysis, Hummels embody a synthesis of the pastoraland the industrial that speaks to a bifurcated ideal image of post-warGermany. On one hand, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau,as he articulated in the 1944 Quebec Memorandum, envisioned dis-mantling heavy industry in the Ruhr region and refashioning Germanyinto a wholly pastoral and agricultural country. Certainly the figurinesof shepherds and laundry maids, concertina players and apple pickerscorrespond to this vision of a harmless Morgenthauian pastoralGermany. Beyond this, the Goebel Porcelain factory’s promotional litera-ture about Hummels hard-sells the hands-on, artisanal nature of pro-ducing their figurines. When they describe their production style as ‘a


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throwback to the time when true craftsmanship reigned’ or give theircompany slogan, ‘Hands make Goebel,’ they capture the archaic, arti-sanal, pre-industrial moment that corresponds so well to Morgenthau’svision of a deindustrialized Germany (Ehrmann and Miller, 1984: 182).1

On the other hand, increasingly in the post-war years the consensusamong the allies, and specifically among the Americans, shifted to favora reindustrialized Germany that would act as an ally and trade partnerin the manner envisioned, for example, by Secretary of State George C.Marshall. That said, it was not a toggle-switch shift from pastoral toindustrial, and as late as 1948 books still debated what they called ‘thedilemma of post-war Germany’ (Johnson, 1948). With this in mind, it isimportant to see that the production of Hummels is also highly indus-trialized (see Figure 8).

Some 1500 people currently work at the factory in a setting of rig-orously divided labor. Sculptors, porcelain chemists, mold specialists,kiln operators, assemblers, paint chemists, glazers, body painters, andface painters each make assembly-line contributions to the final product.As if to symbolize the Fordist conditions of production, each figurine, farfrom being cast whole, is assembled from an average of 15 separately


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FIGURE 8 In Hummels the handmade meets the highly industrializedPhoto by Walter Pfeiffer from the book M.I. Hummel: The Golden Anniversary Album, © Portfolio Press,





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cast pieces. The body, the head, the basket, the arm, the saucy forelock:all these may be cast separately.

Because the Goebel Porcelain factory found itself at the end of thewar only a few miles from the border with Soviet-occupied territory, theUnited States, conscious of the image-value of the capitalist frontier, wasespecially motivated to foster its success. Within a year of war’s end, thefactory was producing Hummels again. In 1952 the US military gover-nor to Germany, John J. McCloy, visited the Goebel factory, lending anofficial stamp to the effort to reindustrialize the Goebel works. Especi-ally in contrast to swastika medallions or other goods obtained on theblack market, purchasing a Hummel at the base PX or nearby souvenirshop patriotically supported the revitalization of industry in the US zoneof occupation. Thus, Hummels functioned synthetically as a throwbackto a benign pastoral economic ‘childhood’ and as a rehabilitated show-case capitalist ‘adulthood’ in nonthreatening industrial manufacture ofluxury consumer goods.


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FIGURE 9 The 1934 New York Times caricatured the fascist subject as infantilecitizenReproduced by kind permission of Express Newspapers




IDEOLOGIES OF THE INFANTILE

Now that we have explored several metaphorical readings of childhood,let us be more literal and consider the figurine of the Hummel child in thecontext of actual German children in Germany, for children constitutedan important locus for negotiating post-war American notions of Germanguilt and innocence, of punishment and rapprochement. Childhood in aHummel world may connote innocence, wonderment, impishness, and agentle piety, but such values must be seen as only one side in the struggleto categorize childhood in post-war Germany. Because of the peculiarlydocile nature of citizenship under dictatorship, adult fascist subjects underHitler had come to be imagined in the American press as what LaurenBerlant (1997) has conceptualized as ‘infantile citizens’. (See Figure 9.)

By the end of the war this metaphor was literalized as actual Germanyouths emerged in the press and propaganda of the occupying forces asa preeminent danger. Hitler’s ‘Werewolves’ captured the public interestwith their combination of fanaticism and youth. Frank Capra’s andTheodore Geisel’s 1945 occupation training film Your Job in Germanysingled out children as the most dangerous category of Germans, in partbecause American soldiers are least likely to be wary of them and in partbecause they are the only Germans who have lived their whole livesunder fascism. ‘Guard particularly against this group,’ the film’svoiceover reads, ‘these are the most dangerous: German youth’ (Capraand Geisel, 1945). In time, and, as I would argue, after being saturatedwith images such as those that Hummel figurines offer, Allied attitudestoward German youth softened. To provide an alternative to the HitlerYouth, Patrick J. Moriarty, a GI in the Labor Supervision Office, begana club for young Germans in 1946 (Reed, 1947: viii). That same year areporter for the National Geographic witnessed how the US Militarygovernment encouraged Americans stationed in Germany to democra-tize German youth through baseball (see Figure 10). It is difficult to sayhow large a part Hummel figurines played in renegotiating the under-standing of German children in the post-war years from dangerousenemy to harmless if endangered ward but it seems beyond doubt thatthey at least participated in this renegotiation.

CONCLUSION: RESISTING THE GIST

We see now that one problem with a Bennettian model for understandingthe culturally liminal role of Hummels is the difficulty of putting our fingeron exactly who plays the part of the image-broker and controller of theterms by which Hummels were and are consumed. Is it the artist of theoriginal drawings? the porcelain company who transformed select imagesinto figurines? the German government who controlled their production?


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the US government who pro-moted their consumption? theTexas museum curator? thecurio seller? the end-pointconsumer who may infuse theobjects with any number ofmeanings: economic, senti-mental, aesthetic, ethnocul-tural?

The multiplicity of voiceand the ongoing diachronicnature of their ideologicalauthorship makes Hummels arich counterexample to atotalizing image of a culturalother, against which manyhave warned (Said, 1978;Fabian, 1983; Pratt, 1992, toname a few). In recent workon how non-regionally-identi-fying Americans viewAppalachia, Kathleen Stewartcriticizes this same tendency:‘“American” encounters with“Appalachia” then, comealways already encased in atotalizing transcendent order . . . We imagine ourselves privy to some-thing like the “gist” of the place’ (1996: 119–20). An interpretive modelthat understands ideological souvenirs as palimpsests of disparate his-torical moments and as products of multiple authorship offers a way tocircumvent the pitfall of reducing a cultural image to its apparitional‘gist’.

The German Fest at Guttenberg, Iowa (USA), resists the reductionto a ‘gist’ of culture in an especially flamboyant and memorable way.Every September in this tiny German-American town on the MississippiRiver there is a human Hummel look-alike contest in which parentsdress up their youngest, smallest children in hand-sewn lederhosen anddirndls and outfit them with the props carried by children in the fig-urines: a basket of flowers, a leather valise, an umbrella. The child muststand motionless for two full minutes, becoming in effect a human doll.A panel of judges selects a winner who receives as a fitting prize anactual Hummel figurine (see Figure 11).

In a sense this demarcates one extreme of an ideological souvenir’sefficacy: an audience consumes an image so thoroughly that it molds


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FIGURE 10 Childhood rehabilitated:Soldiers bring American values to Germanythrough baseball democracyFrom A Pocket Guide to Germany, Washington: US

Department of Defense, 1951




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performance!

Viet-Anh Le

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Viet-Anh Le

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Viet-Anh Le

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Viet-Anh Le

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itself in the image of the souvenir. Like a Rieffenstahl propaganda filmin which the athletic body on screen provides an image of somatic per-fection on which the viewing populace should mold itself through therigors of physical culture, the Hummel figurine furnishes a culturalmodel for the actual children of Guttenberg. In another respect,however, the look-alike contest disturbs the smooth functioning of ideo-logical mimesis. Any sense of Germanness, of pastoral historicity, ofwhatever ‘gist’ Hummels aspire to in their ordinary life as circulatingcommodities, is revealed as something theatrically and temporarilyimitable. It can be cut from colored felt and put on and taken off at willby Americans who speak not a word of German nor have, in all likeli-hood, ever seen a Bavarian pasture. In fact this theatrical rendering ofHummels effaces the very materiality of the figurines themselves. Itreminds us that Hummels were not originally figurines but drawings andwatercolors. It directs our attention to the polyvocality of their author-ship, an authorship that now extends even to the theatrical and carni-valesque uses to which their end-users put them in street fairs. The‘meaning’ of Hummels seems less arbitrated by any one artist, manu-facturer, curator, state, or consumer than collectively and contestedlyproduced by all.


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FIGURE 11 Ethnic mimesis: the Hummel look-alike contest at the GuttenbergGerman FestPhoto by the author




merebrick

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Acknowledgements

Thanks especially to Kathy Pence and Rudy Koshar for their helpful comments.

Note

1. Many of the facts about the figurines’ production in this, and especially inthe following paragraph, I take from this volume.

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◆ JOHN CHA IMOV is Assistant Professor of German at Coe College, CedarRapids, Iowa (USA). In his current research he is investigating modes andmetaphors of ethnic self-invention. A monograph in progress entitled Oompah,of which the present study is a part, analyzes the architecture and invented folk-ways of German-American tourist towns. Address: Department of Foreign Lan-guages, Coe College, 1220 First Avenue NE, Cedar Rapids, IA 52402, USA. [email:[email protected]]


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Documents

Hummel Figurines : Molding a Collectible Germany