I don’t know whether we need this, this history, Haya says.
There are terrible dolls, Jarmušek says.
That is how Haya and Jarmušek learn that more than six hundred years before, two doll-makers — two Dockenmacher—live in Nuremberg, and that wooden dolls follow the clay dolls, and later there are dolls made of alabaster, wax, rags; there are colourful dolls and dolls dressed in the fashions of the day. They learn that toy production in general follows the making of dolls; that Georg Hieronimus Bestelmeier, a Nuremberg merchant and shop owner in the centre of the Old City, in his catalogue for 1798 lists 8,000 items produced in the Nuremberg workshops, including rocking horses, wooden blocks, doll’s houses completely furnished, kitchens for dolls with all the equipment, miniature shops, an array of pewter animals and other wind-up figures, children’s musical instruments and all sorts of other wonders.
They are making little worlds of the dead, whispers Haya to Jarmušek.
Worlds for fun. Worlds people play with, Jarmušek says.
In the eighteenth century the so-called Papierdockenmacher make dolls, animals, papier-mâché masks, or only body parts, which are then glued or sewn onto a stuffed leather torso. In the second half of the eighteenth century the Hilpert, Ammon, Heinrichen, Allgeyer and Lorenz families dictate the production of pewter dolls. Shops and children’s stores are inundated with an exotic (pewter) animal world, with mythological characters and medieval knights. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Trix, Schucho, Bub, Fleischmann, Arnold, Plank, Schoenner and Bing companies become synonymous with the desirable toy. The number of people involved in designing and producing toys keeps growing. While, for example, 1,366 people work on making toys in 1895, ten years later there are more than 8,000 of them, and 243 companies or small toy factories are at work in Nuremberg in 1914. And so, the Nuremberg world of imagination grows and grows and travels everywhere, especially to the United States. Toys feed Nuremberg and Nuremberg feeds on toys.
Then comes World War One, and with World War One begins the quiet demise of Nuremberg toys. Instead of toys, weapons are produced. Instead of little varnished, mechanical cars, big olive-drab caterpillar tanks are produced. Instead of swift electric trains that circle through mountain landscapes in elegant salons and spacious children’s bedrooms, the hit is Big Bertha. Then, from 1933 on, Jews, the majority owners of the factories begin to disappear from Nuremberg at a dizzying rate, so the toys disappear, too. In the summer of 1943 Hitler announces a ban on manufacturing toys, all toys. Hitler advises children to Play at the arts of combat and sing war songs, marches.
At the doll and toy exhibition Haya and Jarmušek look at a photograph beneath which there is a pile of old toys, stained and broken. The picture shows first-grade Nuremberg pupils from the Jewish elementary school located at the time at Obere Kanalstrasse 25. The picture is dated 1936. Each child in the picture is holding a toy. The boys hold a paper cone of some sort in which there might be sweets, models of little metal automobiles in lively colours, perhaps a small train, a tin soldier or a miniature tank. Most of the girls are holding dolls.
But by 1943, when Hitler puts a stop to toy manufacturing, the children in the picture no longer exist. Four of them (numbers 10, 18, 32 and 33) are deported to Poland with their families in 1942, to Izbica, the packed departure lounge for Belsen. Their teacher is taken to Krasniczyn. No-one knows who the children marked 2, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 24, 28, 30, 31, 35 and 36 are, where they have gone or what has happened to them. Perhaps they are riding along on a moveable shelf in Bad Arolsen, which Haya knows nothing about at that point, though she might have known. But no matter where the children from the picture went, no matter where they were taken, in 1942 they probably carried a toy with them. They were the children of Nuremberg, connoisseurs when it came to dolls, trains and automobiles.
When Birkenau was liberated, aside from the gold teeth, the hair and clothing, the piles of bones, dolls were also found, many of them from Nuremberg. Their hair pulled out, naked, with no limbs, often with eyes missing, so similar to their little owners. In camps, objects and people merge. In camps, objects and people become symbiotic.
These camp dolls are like Bellmer’s, but smaller, Jarmušek says.
Bellmer who? asks Haya.
Three years before the picture of the first-graders of the Jewish elementary school was taken in Nuremberg, in Berlin Hans Bellmer fashions his first life-size doll, as if mocking the future Borghild. Afterwards, Bellmer makes many more “sick” Puppen in Paris. He makes Puppen with moveable pubic bones, with mobile, twisted limbs, with extra limbs; Puppen with feet in white socks and children’s shoes, their private parts without pubic hair; gigantic monstrosities of immature adults who mock the impeccably modelled, muscular bodies which Leni loves photographing and Adolf loved watching. Bellmer’s Puppen were monster Puppen, huge mirrors reflecting history and its Macher.
Albrecht Dürer was born in Nuremberg, Jarmušek says.
And Hans Sachs, Haya says.
The first pocket watch was made in Nuremberg, Jarmušek says.
The first European railway line was built in Nuremberg, Haya says.
The Nuremberg laws were adopted in Nuremberg.
There were trials in Nuremberg.
Nuremberg was reduced to rubble by bombs. Nuremberg was a rubbish dump with 100,000 people left homeless.
Nuremberg has a promenade along the River Pegnitz. Let’s go for a walk along the Pegnitz, Haya says. Are there any Jews in Nuremberg?
We learned a lot about Nuremberg, Jarmušek says.
Yes. Nuremberg is a green city, Haya says.
Later, Haya left, Jarmušek flew away. Like a blonde angel Jarmušek flew over Berlin, and Haya went back to Gorizia. I cannot fly with you, she said. I cannot.
Do birds chirp in flight? Haya asks a woman who is sitting next to her. The woman who is sitting next to Haya is elderly, about seventy, and she appears to be agitated.
It is a crime to catch song birds and cage them, says the lady sitting next to Haya. That’s what my neighbour does. My neighbour has nine caged birds, which no longer sing, she says.
We started out down Himmelweg.
To paradise?
To the chirping of birds.
What is your name?