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HUMMEL FIGURINES
Molding a Collectible Germany

J O H N C H A I MOV
Department of Foreign Languages, Coe College, Iowa, USA

Abstract
How are we to understand the many-stranded, even contradictory, ways an
artifact projects an ethnic image across the space of the contact zone? A
staple of souvenir shops in German-American tourist towns and the focus
of an entire museum in Texas, diminutive porcelain Hummel figurines have
been selling an image of Germany to a world audience since their appear-
ance in 1935. Various entities – corporate, civic, national – have sought to
control or exploit the ethnic image that Hummels carry, molding them into
what one might call ‘ideological souvenirs’. But what ideologies do they sell,
what messages of ethnicity do they convey? Strategic efforts to deploy
Hummels as ideological souvenirs run up against shifting historical
conditions and conflicting interpretations of the figurines’ symbolic
meanings. The moving target of historical reception thus exposes the
dialectic 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. Miller

and his wife, Ohioans who have amassed the largest private collection
of Hummels anywhere, and you will hear them emphasize the personal
dimension of collecting. They bought their first Hummel in the 1950s,
they tell, because it reminded them of their children. Their daughter was
slightly taller than their son, just like the children in the figurine, and
they 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

Journal of Material Culture

Copyright © 2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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social station or to the class-symbolic value that such a collection may

have. Today Hummels cost hundreds, older ones sometimes thousands
of dollars, and their displayable uselessness is just what Veblen would
fix 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 into
current dollar amounts. What attracts me to Mrs Miller’s comment about
the figurine resembling her own children is its attention to the figural.
She seems highly conscious, in a way that is smokescreened by and itself
smokescreens the economic orientation of the price guides, that Hummel
children participate in an allegorical correspondence to real people. For
Mrs Miller, they function as part of a domestic, familial imaginary. Like
the fetish value Marx theorizes to describe the mysterious social life
hidden within commodities, Mrs Miller sees in the Hummel figurine a
value divorced from its material substance. Unlike Marx, for whom the
fetish 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 usually
disingenuous collector’s mantra, ‘Buy what you like,’ to internalize
Hummel children in effect as members of her family. The fact that an
American in Ohio can look at lederhosen- and dirndl-clad Hummels and
see, as if in a mirror, her own family, testifies to the power such objects
have to shape the way we perceive other cultures.
This article takes Mrs Miller’s Pygmalion gesture seriously and seeks
to analyze some of the ways in which Hummel figurines function as
dolls-come-to-life to convey messages of ethnicity, history, politics. As
such, it takes as its starting point Tony Bennett’s Foucauldian notions of
the artwork as a sort of medium through which state ideologies are inten-
tionally and strategically broadcast to a consuming public. The closer
one looks, however, the more one sees proliferating layers of allegory,
chance occurrences in history and geography, competing and conflicting
interpretations of the figurines’ symbolic values, and multiple and diver-
gent contexts against which ideologues and consumers alike are to
understand 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 the
dialectic 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-American
tourist town of New Braunfels, Texas. There are glass cabinets filled with
hundreds of the diminutive porcelain figurines. Beyond that, displays of
large-format pastel drawings that served as the basis for the figurines fill

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an entire floor. On the

second floor one can see
personal effects belong-
ing to the artist, Berta
Hummel, and watch a
videotape of her life story
in which one learns that
she was born in Bavaria
in 1909, studied painting
in the late 1920s at the
Academy of Applied Arts
in Munich, and entered a
F I G U R E 1 Why here? the M. I. Hummel
Württemberg Franciscan
Museum, New Braunfels, Texas convent in 1931, where
Photo by the author she later took the veil and
the name Maria Innocen-
tia. Her drawings of chil-
dren and religious
themes became popular in the early 1930s as calendars and greeting
cards, and it was in a Munich card shop in 1933 that Franz Goebel,
owner of a Bavarian porcelain factory, saw Hummel’s drawings and had
the idea of transforming the children she drew into three-dimensional
porcelain figurines.
I was vexed, however, by the persistent awareness that this was a
permanent museum located in a small town in Texas and dedicated to
an artist who never set foot in the United States (see Figure 1). Why?
What is the importance of Hummel figurines in the United States? My
search for an answer led me to understand Hummel figurines as what
one might call ideological souvenirs. In a more intense way than an Eiffel
Tower keychain memorializes a trip to Paris the Hummel figurine, in a
mobile and global but also unstable way, mediates cultures – chiefly
German and American cultures – so as to serve not just commercial ends
but 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 and
Foucault’s theorizing of disciplinary techniques, Bennett shows how
states discipline citizens with ideologies carried in exhibitions of art,
industry, and ethnography. In a shift roughly parallel to that from fixed
stage to agitprop, the fixed museum transforms itself into world’s fair:
Public museums

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provided the modern state with a

deep and continuous ideological
backdrop but one which, if it was
to play this role, could not be
adjusted to respond to shorter-
term ideological requirements.
Exhibitions met this need,
injecting new life into the exhibi-
tionary complex and rendering its
ideological configurations more
pliable . . . [and] mobilizing [them]
strategically in relation to the
more immediate ideological and
political exigencies of the particu-
lar moment. (Bennett, 1996: 102)
F I G U R E 2 How to consume ethnic
images: a 1970s US Army guidebook
The ideological souvenir, one to Germany shows civilians in a shop
might say, marks the next stage in that sells Hummels
the pliability of the state’s disci-
plinary strategies. The ideological
souvenir, physically transferable
from German gift shop or domestic antique store into the display case
or curio shelf at home, diffuses across a broad, often international market
area to become an invisible exhibition, an every-person’s museum.
Hummel figurines were to some extent produced from the beginning
for the American market. Franz Goebel’s father, then owner of the por-
celain works, traveled to the US in the 1920s to learn about porcelain
manufacture and, more importantly, to learn about American markets
so that Goebel Porcelain could better tailor their product lines to Ameri-
can tastes. Hummel figurines were clearly a part of the company’s
response. In 1935, when Goebel Porcelain displayed the first 48 figurines
at the Leipzig Trade Fair, Marshall Field department store of Chicago
placed a large order.
Their commercial viability ultimately only accounted for a portion
of their success. States, and particularly the United States, deployed
Hummels to effect particular ideological ends. On post-war American
bases, the Post Exchange, or PX, where GIs bought Marlboros and
Hershey’s chocolate bars, stocked Hummel figurines. A post-war US
Department of the Army guide book, What to Do in Germany, listed col-
lecting Hummel figurines as an ideal pastime for Americans serving in
Germany 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-war
Germany 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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of Germans and of Germany to

American collectors. (Of course,
Americans were not the only ones
who consumed this image;
Hummels also helped post-war
Germans sell an image of them-
selves to themselves.)
The broad outlines of this
image are easy to sketch, for they
contrast rather neatly with the pro-
paganda image of the National-
Socialist German disseminated
during the Second World War.
Instead of the monumental,
muscled body, a Hummel portrays
the miniature body of a delicate
child; instead of munitions
workers and panzer-driving
soldiers in a highly industrialized
state, Hummel children live in a
pastoral world of farm animals and
flowers and pedestrian travel. In a
similar vein, instead of Prussian
and Ruhrgebiet modernism, an F I G U R E 3 Pastoral, pedestrian,
indefinable but nostalgic Bavarian nostalgic: the Merry Wanderer
past. Instead of violence and Social Photo by Walter Pfeiffer from the book M.I.
Darwinism, Hummel children Hummel: The Golden Anniversary Album,
often act out little maudlin ges- © Portfolio Press, 1984. Reproduced by permission
tures of kindness. Instead of the of the publisher
National Socialist religion of
Nordic/Teutonic legends, the overtly religious iconography of many
Hummels signal a return to traditional, specifically Catholic, Christian-
ity (see Figure 3).

PAINTING THE PAST

Of the characteristics that made Hummels appropriate American vehicles
for a rehabilitated image of Germans, the most important was perhaps
their anti-Nazi pedigree. This pedigree was established first and foremost
through the life story of Sister Maria Innocentia, which is generally told
as a virtual passion play of suffering at the hands of the Nazis. As part of
the standardizing (Gleichschaltung) of religious institutions, in 1937 the
Nazi government began imposing strictures against convents, including
hers, that would eventually lead to expropriation. Not so coincidentally,

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the collectors’ books relate, Maria

Innocentia was first treated in 1938
for tuberculosis. After disbanding
the convent and reconstituting it as
a repatriation camp, Hummel was
allowed to return and serve in the
capacity of caretaker to the return-
ing Reichsdeutsche housed there.
She survived the hardships of
wartime but in ever worsening
health, finally succumbing to tuber-
culosis in 1946. Sister Maria Inno-
centia’s suffering at the hands of
Nazi persecutors offers an intrigu-
ing alternative history of the
Catholic Church under National
Socialism to the better known
history of high-level pacts between
the Vatican and Berlin.
F I G U R E 4 ‘Hydrocephaly’: Nazi Adding to Hummels’ anti-Nazi
ideologues read style as pathology pedigree are attacks in the Nazi
Photo by Walter Pfeiffer from the book M.I. press on Sister Hummel’s draw-
Hummel: The Golden Anniversary Album, ings that occurred at the same time
© Portfolio Press, 1984. Reproduced by permission
she contracted her fatal illness.
of the publisher
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 Jesuses
and angels of B. Hummel.’ In hydrocephalic infants, cerebrospinal fluid
accumulates in the space between brain and skull, swelling the head and
sometimes leading to paralysis or death. By reading representational aes-
thetics as pathology (see Figure 4) the author sets Hummel’s religious
drawings close to the category of ‘degenerate art,’ exhibitions of which
had begun touring Germany the year before. In the degenerate art
shows, painting and sculpture, much of it Expressionist, was ridiculed
for failing to conform to National Socialist ideals of beauty, realism, and
health. George Mosse (1991: 26) grasps a central aspect of the slippery
concept ‘degenerate’ when he links the aesthetic of ‘degenerate’ art-
works with 19th-century phobias surrounding the supposed pathology
of ‘nervousness’ and its attendant iconography of exhaustion, contor-
tions, and grimaces. Demonizing Sister Hummel’s figural style by
describing it in terms of a medical condition links the art-historical
rhetoric in the Hochland article very strongly to the cultural criticism of
those who mounted the ‘Degenerate Art’ shows in 1937.

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In an essay on Emil Nolde, Russell A. Berman (1992: 57) reminds us

that 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 simply
because the Nazis praised them. With this skepticism in hand I’d like to
sketch out a few ways in which Hummel figurines have a somewhat
more 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 the
figurines), Hummels share several points of reference with art valued
positively by Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, and other definers of the
Nazi aesthetic. Thematically Hummels ran the gamut from sacred to
secular, often reworking the same theme in both registers. One sacred
example shows Jesus surrounded by the lambs that represent him
iconographically, while its secular counterpart shows a child goatherd
in Bavarian dress surrounded by his flock (see Figure 5). At least in
terms of its subject, this Hummel is hardly to be distinguished from a
painting en-titled ‘Pasture-Idyll’ by J. P. Junghanns in the ‘Great
German Art Exhibition’ of 1943, which was reproduced on a mass scale
in the Völkische Beobachter (see Figure 6).
Even without this particular example one could claim an affinity

F I G U R E 5 Thematically, some Hummels were not so different from their

Third-Reich contemporaries
Photo 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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F I G U R E 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

between the National Socialist idealization of peasant life and the scores
of 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, although
Goebel Porcelain was able to produce and sell Hummel figurines
through 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 to
Goebel 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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tent or to their savvy selection of motifs for figurines from Hummel’s

drawings (see Figure 7).
Several early Hummels comprise a martial subtheme that bring them
close to themes depicted in Nazi art. The first to appear, in the initial run
of figurines displayed at the 1935 Leipzig Trade Fair, was Hummel 20,
‘Prayer Before Battle,’ which depicts a would-be boy soldier kneeling in
prayer beside a toy battle charger. The following year Goebel Porcelain
debuted Hummels 50 and 55, ‘Volunteers,’ a drummer striding beside a
boy playing infantryman with a shouldered rifle, and ‘Saint George,’
depicting the well-known dragonslayer and patron saint of soldiers. It is
noteworthy that in 1955 Goebel Porcelain brought out a figurine of the
drummer boy from ‘Volunteers’ but without his gun-toting comrade. A
later Hummel, 332: ‘Soldier Boy,’ depicting an older boy soldier with long
pants and a rifle, dates from 1963. It is interesting to read this piece as
reflecting the changed status of Germany as an expressly military ally
after it had begun rearming in the mid-1950s. The ‘Saint George’ drawing
by Berta Hummel, which actually has much more of the angular, car-
toonish look of Nazi illustration art than does the softer, more rounded
figurine, echoes the Nazi self-portrayal in painting and festivals of
‘Nordic’ Germans as medieval knights. I do not want to imply any

F I G U R E 7 Was it pieces such as ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ that allowed Goebel

Porcelain 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,
1984. Reproduced by permission of the publisher

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conscious link between themes in Nazi art and in Hummels. I simply

want to suggest that had these boy warriors and toy soldiers made up a
greater portion of the figurine line, Hummels might not have been so
effective in selling a pacified image of Germany in the post-war years.

THE ‘GOOD’ SOUVENIR

Notwithstanding these misgivings about the figurines’ ambiguous setting
within their Nazi context, Allied ideologues had good reason to use them
as a way to sell a likeable Germany. Since I have begun with a thematic
analysis, let me continue with their consumption as images and work
toward the conditions of their production.
Goebel Porcelain had tried before to market figurines modeled after
Sister 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 peasant
pursuits in which the figurines are engaged: they are both reminders of
an earlier time, of primitive origins. Like Oskar Mazerath in Günter
Grass’s 1951 novel The Tin Drum, a Hummel figurine is a child that will
never grow up. Also like Oskar, the enduring infancy of the Hummel
child allows it to wander through the political traumas of mid-
20th-century Germany free from all responsibility. Unlike Oskar, but
importantly for the national identity it incorporates, the Hummel child
wears 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 immediate
historical past.
A cognate post-war ‘remembering’ of childhood that had the effect
of 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 films
of the post-war period, Hummels relate in contradictory ways to their
national past. Celia Appelgate makes the link between Heimat and child-
hood explicitly: ‘It [Heimat] brings to mind . . . the restricted and secure
society of a childhood memory’ (1990: 8). As Anton Kaes (1989: 15)
argues, Heimat films, whose directors learned their craft at the UFA
studios of the 1930s and 1940s, derive from Nazi ‘blood and soil’ pro-
ductions, which glorified rural life. At the same time, they create a
dreamworld wish-fulfillment of a healthy and ethical Germany that
amounts to, as Kaes phrases it, a ‘flight from memory’ (1989: 10).
Hummel figurines’ origins are presumably much further from the Nazi
Propaganda Ministry, which vetted every UFA film, but they feed the
same ‘amnesiac impulse’ towards a historical ‘childhood’ that Ralph
Willett (1989: 127) sees pervasively in the post-war period.

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The notion of historical amnesia is particularly ironic when one

recalls that the meaning of the French word souvenir is ‘to remember’.
The promotion of amnesiac souvenirs such as Hummels gains greater
clarity when viewed against the backdrop of campaigns against sou-
venirs that ‘remembered’ too well. A spate of articles in the domestic
press in late 1947 and early 1948 warned the families of former soldiers
about the dangers of pistols, rifles, sabers, artillery shells, and grenades
brought home to America from both theaters of war and that may yet
cause harm. A bazooka crippled five New Jersey children at a birthday
party, and a booby-trapped German fountain pen exploded and severely
wounded a veteran on Long Island (Neff, 1947: 12). District attorneys
from Brooklyn and Baltimore blamed souvenir guns from the war for
boosting the rate of violent crime in their districts (Paxton, 1948: 12). In
response, the government formed a national War Trophies Safety Com-
mission to educate the American populace on matters of safety and to
encourage 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 an
effort – just as World War II enemies were becoming allies in the politi-
cal struggle against communism (witness, for example, the scaling back
of 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 been
usurped by a moment of estrangement in an era of industrialized pro-
duction. So goes the argument in Susan Stewart’s On Longing (1984), in
which she offers the example of the miniature toy chair, whose vogue
arose with the advent of machine-produced furniture to bridge the
chasm mass-consumers felt between themselves and the mass-produced
commodity. That Hummels are doubly miniatures – small in stature and
young in age – lets them participate in this ideological mechanism. Yet,
Hummels go beyond this. Even the sleight of hand by which Hummels
ask their owners to imagine an idyllic and pastoral past is not as simple
as it seems. In my analysis, Hummels embody a synthesis of the pastoral
and the industrial that speaks to a bifurcated ideal image of post-war
Germany. 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 Germany
into a wholly pastoral and agricultural country. Certainly the figurines
of shepherds and laundry maids, concertina players and apple pickers
correspond to this vision of a harmless Morgenthauian pastoral
Germany. 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 their

company slogan, ‘Hands make Goebel,’ they capture the archaic, arti-
sanal, pre-industrial moment that corresponds so well to Morgenthau’s
vision of a deindustrialized Germany (Ehrmann and Miller, 1984: 182).1
On the other hand, increasingly in the post-war years the consensus
among the allies, and specifically among the Americans, shifted to favor
a reindustrialized Germany that would act as an ally and trade partner
in the manner envisioned, for example, by Secretary of State George C.
Marshall. That said, it was not a toggle-switch shift from pastoral to
industrial, and as late as 1948 books still debated what they called ‘the
dilemma of post-war Germany’ (Johnson, 1948). With this in mind, it is
important 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, and
face painters each make assembly-line contributions to the final product.
As if to symbolize the Fordist conditions of production, each figurine, far
from being cast whole, is assembled from an average of 15 separately

FIGURE 8 In Hummels the handmade meets the highly industrialized

Photo 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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FIGURE 9 The 1934 New York Times caricatured the fascist subject as infantile
citizen
Reproduced by kind permission of Express Newspapers

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 the
war only a few miles from the border with Soviet-occupied territory, the
United States, conscious of the image-value of the capitalist frontier, was
especially motivated to foster its success. Within a year of war’s end, the
factory was producing Hummels again. In 1952 the US military gover-
nor to Germany, John J. McCloy, visited the Goebel factory, lending an
official stamp to the effort to reindustrialize the Goebel works. Especi-
ally in contrast to swastika medallions or other goods obtained on the
black market, purchasing a Hummel at the base PX or nearby souvenir
shop patriotically supported the revitalization of industry in the US zone
of occupation. Thus, Hummels functioned synthetically as a throwback
to a benign pastoral economic ‘childhood’ and as a rehabilitated show-
case capitalist ‘adulthood’ in nonthreatening industrial manufacture of
luxury consumer goods.

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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 the
context of actual German children in Germany, for children constituted
an important locus for negotiating post-war American notions of German
guilt and innocence, of punishment and rapprochement. Childhood in a
Hummel world may connote innocence, wonderment, impishness, and a
gentle piety, but such values must be seen as only one side in the struggle
to categorize childhood in post-war Germany. Because of the peculiarly
docile nature of citizenship under dictatorship, adult fascist subjects under
Hitler had come to be imagined in the American press as what Lauren
Berlant (1997) has conceptualized as ‘infantile citizens’. (See Figure 9.)
By the end of the war this metaphor was literalized as actual German
youths emerged in the press and propaganda of the occupying forces as
a preeminent danger. Hitler’s ‘Werewolves’ captured the public interest
with their combination of fanaticism and youth. Frank Capra’s and
Theodore Geisel’s 1945 occupation training film Your Job in Germany
singled out children as the most dangerous category of Germans, in part
because American soldiers are least likely to be wary of them and in part
because they are the only Germans who have lived their whole lives
under fascism. ‘Guard particularly against this group,’ the film’s
voiceover reads, ‘these are the most dangerous: German youth’ (Capra
and Geisel, 1945). In time, and, as I would argue, after being saturated
with images such as those that Hummel figurines offer, Allied attitudes
toward German youth softened. To provide an alternative to the Hitler
Youth, Patrick J. Moriarty, a GI in the Labor Supervision Office, began
a club for young Germans in 1946 (Reed, 1947: viii). That same year a
reporter for the National Geographic witnessed how the US Military
government encouraged Americans stationed in Germany to democra-
tize German youth through baseball (see Figure 10). It is difficult to say
how large a part Hummel figurines played in renegotiating the under-
standing of German children in the post-war years from dangerous
enemy to harmless if endangered ward but it seems beyond doubt that
they at least participated in this renegotiation.

CONCLUSION: RESISTING THE GIST

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

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the US government who pro-

moted their consumption? the
Texas museum curator? the
curio seller? the end-point
consumer who may infuse the
objects with any number of
meanings: economic, senti-
mental, aesthetic, ethnocul-
tural?
The multiplicity of voice
and the ongoing diachronic
nature of their ideological
authorship makes Hummels a
rich counterexample to a
totalizing image of a cultural
other, against which many
have warned (Said, 1978;
Fabian, 1983; Pratt, 1992, to
name a few). In recent work F I G U R E 1 0 Childhood rehabilitated:
on how non-regionally-identi- Soldiers bring American values to Germany
fying Americans view through baseball democracy
Appalachia, Kathleen Stewart From A Pocket Guide to Germany, Washington: US
criticizes this same tendency: Department of Defense, 1951
‘“American” encounters with
“Appalachia” then, come
always already encased in a
totalizing transcendent order . . . We imagine ourselves privy to some-
thing like the “gist” of the place’ (1996: 119–20). An interpretive model
that understands ideological souvenirs as palimpsests of disparate his-
torical moments and as products of multiple authorship offers a way to
circumvent the pitfall of reducing a cultural image to its apparitional
‘gist’.
The German Fest at Guttenberg, Iowa (USA), resists the reduction
to a ‘gist’ of culture in an especially flamboyant and memorable way.
Every September in this tiny German-American town on the Mississippi
River there is a human Hummel look-alike contest in which parents
dress up their youngest, smallest children in hand-sewn lederhosen and
dirndls and outfit them with the props carried by children in the fig-
urines: a basket of flowers, a leather valise, an umbrella. The child must
stand motionless for two full minutes, becoming in effect a human doll.
A panel of judges selects a winner who receives as a fitting prize an
actual Hummel figurine (see Figure 11).
In a sense this demarcates one extreme of an ideological souvenir’s
efficacy: an audience consumes an image so thoroughly that it molds

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F I G U R E 11 Ethnic mimesis: the Hummel look-alike contest at the Guttenberg

German Fest
Photo by the author

itself in the image of the souvenir. Like a Rieffenstahl propaganda film

in which the athletic body on screen provides an image of somatic per-
fection on which the viewing populace should mold itself through the
rigors of physical culture, the Hummel figurine furnishes a cultural
model 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, of
whatever ‘gist’ Hummels aspire to in their ordinary life as circulating
commodities, is revealed as something theatrically and temporarily
imitable. It can be cut from colored felt and put on and taken off at will
by Americans who speak not a word of German nor have, in all likeli-
hood, ever seen a Bavarian pasture. In fact this theatrical rendering of
Hummels effaces the very materiality of the figurines themselves. It
reminds us that Hummels were not originally figurines but drawings and
watercolors. 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 contestedly
produced by all.

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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 in
the following paragraph, I take from this volume.

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◆ J O H N C H A I M O V is Assistant Professor of German at Coe College, Cedar

Rapids, Iowa (USA). In his current research he is investigating modes and
metaphors 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:
jchaimov@coe.edu]

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