- Yg. 1926, No. 31 -

Have you already seen the calf with the two heads? Or the Negro at the fair eating live rats? Or the spiky lady who shows up at Nuremberg Castle and whose virginity is indestructible because of iron? It did not scare you? Then visit the Landesgewerbemuseum in Stuttgart, Department of Flavors. You will learn the scary!

Mr. Director Pazaurek will show you under glass, well mothballed, the spirit of the deadly middle class of the past 50 years. You can see there, with which in the imperial, the terrible time, you have satisfied your unrestrained urge for culture of mind and home, from the patent closett seat "morality" to the Zeppelin head as a tap. There are all the sweet things, loveless and systematically ordered. "Travel presents": fly sponges, porcelain pigs and cows with city panoramas painted on the belly, beer mugs etc. "Greetings from N."

It was a time of ascension, after seventy. The young girls visited the boarding school, crocheted sofa covers and doilies in large quantities, branded the trumpeter von Säckingen, embroidered meaningful sayings on canvas ("Where faith, there love, where love, there peace!"), Which were hung framed over the marriage bed, or, if it said "Happy awakening without worries - good morning!", over the vanity. Firm in art, the two Raphael angels were painted on tobacco tins, plates, knives, forks, scissors and lights. Where there was space.

It was also pious: a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus painted on the coffee cup made the morning broth taste so good again. The flourishing industry supported Christianity wherever it could, through mass production of guardian angels, Lourdes Madonnas, porcelain holy water stoats, plaster and papier mâché. Cheap and quite according to the religious train of the time.

The everyday utensils were relieved of their sober practicality by giving them partly "joke", partly "artistic" forms. There are revolvers as paperweights, riding whips as thermometers, the obligatory dachshund dog from the Flying Leaves, who is simply trained for everything: cutting off cigar tips, decorating Aunt Paula's lace blouse and sending postcard greetings. From skulls one drank Schmollis or drew mustard on the sausage, W.-C.-Anlagen had to serve as an ashtray. The Don Juan, who had the "savoir vivre", was not a stranger to sublimated eroticism at that time: they used delicate corsets for women's cigars and, as a boot-puller, a lady with lascivious legs spreading out of wood. Extremely popular was a replica of the Brussels "Manneken piss" as a liqueur bottle. Cheers!

Then came the "big time". Patridiotism took a deep breath. On beer felts, pitchers, handkerchiefs, gingerbread, surrounded by oak leaves, the visages of our country fathers and mass murderers were glorified. Zeppelins, submarines, the "fat Berta" were emblazoned as jewelery on the Treudeutsche Christmas tree. And because the Heimatkrieger wanted to have some of the big time, they made flower vases from grenades and embarked on black-and-white-red bed templates with woven EK in the marina, or tied a black-white-red beard. The artificial honey "Iron Hindenburg" had such a resounding success that the manufacturer of the black-and-white-red "best German durchlochten cleaning paper: German oak" was showered with orders.

It was a glorious time. Pazaurek calls this category his collection "Hurray Kitsch".

But one thing is missing in this milieu: the mummy, for which all this was created. The man with the prestretched board of starch, with rolls and train boots, with bacon ridges on his neck and curling on his heels, with a whiskered mustache, a powerful hurray and all the years of the "Gartenlaube" and "Über Land und Meer", member of a dozen clubs, father of two Marriageable daughters with decent dowry (sheets, Wärtikoh and Regulator), ditto of a corps student. But Pazaurek can not incorporate this cultural mummy into his collection: it is still needed today at public offices, offices and at regular tables!

1926, 31 Tyll