![]() The back flap lists books and colour postcards of uniforms of the SS. It was this unique concentration of talent made available for its production that enabled Allach porcelain to be of such a high quality, and consequently highly desirable …” “The unique circumstances that prevailed in Germany … made it possible for the very best artists, designers, potters, and all persons associated with the manufacture of fine porcelain, to be taken from the many world-famous factories that existed in Germany at that time, such as Dresden, Berlin, Rosenthal etc, and employed at the previously unknown factory at Allach. It is in English, published by Tony L Oliver, from a suburban street in Egham, Surrey, in 1970. It arrives a week later, a small black hardback with a photo of a porcelain statue of Athena on the front. As I don’t know it – there is a plenitude of German factories – I’m intrigued and buy a book on this Allach Porzellan. O n my voyage into porcelain, I come across a reference to one of my favourite designers from the Bauhaus and his work for the Allach porcelain factory. Desire and power, in conjunction with purity, comes at a great cost. It is alchemy.īut there is nothing simple about simplicity. There are very few materials in the world that embody such a strong transformational pull from earth to something that is so light, translucent, so fine that it rings as clear as a bell. The story of its travels, of its trade, is one of desire. It was so rare, so arcane in medieval Europe, that to drink from porcelain was supposed to prevent poison. I thought that I understood the purity of porcelain and its attraction for so many people – to the point of obsession – for a thousand years. And to the hills of the south-west of England, where a Quaker apothecary worked out the arcanum by himself and changed the landscape of Cornwall. I had mapped out my pilgrimage to the white hills of China, where the raw materials were first found, and the hills of Saxony, where the secrets of porcelain were uncovered by a philosopher and an alchemist in the early 18th century. I had not expected a journey to discover what porcelain meant to me – my midlife attempt to work out why I had been working with it for 30 years – to bring me to this place. ![]() Porcelain is a very good German material. He likes this porcelain, he tells me, because it is very well made. Or the alsatian dog, or the plate celebrating the winter solstice inscribed with words of exhortation, crocuses pushing upwards through snowy earth, or the medallions for SS sports competitions. But I could buy the porcelain model of the fresh-faced Hitler Youth banging his drum, eyes on the future, noisy. ![]() Its gilding was finer than any he had encountered before. He was particularly proud of the chess set that had belonged to Heinrich Himmler. ![]()
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