Station: [10] State Regulation

In 1933, the Nazis came to power in Germany and introduced a new, folksy aesthetic.

The innovative avant-garde designs by van de Velde or Gustav Weidanz disappeared into a drawer. They were denigrated as “detrimental to the craft”, and ceramics production in Bürgel was steered back on to the path of peasant crockery supposedly rooted in the soil.

The Berlin-based authority “Schönheit der Arbeit” – Beauty of Labour, which was in charge of improving workplaces in mass-production facilities, handed out major orders for canteen tableware to Carl Fischer. Due to a lack of raw materials, the typical blue-and-white decoration was reversed for these orders. Plates and cups were now predominantly yellowish-white, the colour of the fired pot, and didn’t feature the blue engobe with white dots. Instead, large blue dots decorate the pale base colour.

In the Third Reich, the firm of Carl Fischer was classified as “essential to the war effort” since it could also supply new tableware to families that had been bombed out. So production continued during the war – with the workers including three forced labourers brought from abroad.

The state continued to influence ceramics production during the time of the German Democratic Republic – which marked a return to the classic blue-and-white. The decoration – whether an expression of folk art or not – was in tune with contemporary taste and ultimately rose to become a sought-after export article that brought foreign currency into the country.

That didn’t leave much for the local population. During the entire existence of East Germany, blue-and-white Bürgel pottery was a typical under-the-counter product that was passed on covertly and exchanged for other, equally coveted rarities.