From Ore to Wood

The mountain streams did the heavy work. Lathes were driven by water wheels, often in old ore-stamping mills, and by the middle of the 19th century more than twenty water-powered turning mills stood along the Seiffen valley. In 1869 the Erzgebirge counted 34 turning mills with 410 lathe positions and 624 turners.

One survives. Built in 1758–1760, the Seiffen mill turned three ring-turning lathes and four ordinary lathes from a wooden water wheel 5.2 meters (about 17 feet) across. Turners rented a place at its benches and had to bring their own wood, tools and lamp oil. In a hard frost the wheel froze and all work stopped.

Around 1800 the turners of Seiffen hit on a technique found nowhere else: Reifendrehen, ring turning, which yields dozens of identical animals from a single turned ring of spruce. It made cheap toy animals possible and, the toy museum says, helped make Erzgebirge wooden toys competitive around the world.

Ring-turned animals

At first the toys left the mountains on the backs of peddlers, in baskets, sacks and trays or on handcarts. By local tradition, in 1699 a linen trader named Johann Friedrich Hiemann pushed a wheelbarrow of Seiffen turned goods to the Leipzig fair and came home with orders.

Then the Verleger, the merchant-publishers, took over. They traveled for orders, brought the turners models, wood and paint, and paid them weekly on delivery, sometimes in goods from their own shops rather than in cash. In 1804 the leading Seiffen merchant house was said to pay out about 1,000 thalers a week. Much of the work went out anonymously as Nürnberger Tand, “Nuremberg trinkets,” copied to order from Nuremberg samples. Overseas trade began in 1784; an account of 1804 already names “America” among the main markets, and the boxed Noah’s ark became an export hit.

It was not an easy living. In 1843, 158 turners and toymakers petitioned their lord about their misery: a man who had to compete with cut-price goods, they wrote, would starve along with his family. In 1852 the Saxon state opened a toy-making school in Seiffen. When foreign tariffs hit heavy goods at the end of the century, Seiffen turned to the very small: whole toy villages packed in a matchbox. On the eve of the First World War some 50 towns and villages in the Erzgebirge made toys, in more than 1,100 businesses.

The peddlers who carried Seiffen’s toys to the world

In the 20th century, Christmas kept the woodturning villages alive. At Christmas 1914 the director of the Seiffen toy school saw only a few lanterns carried to the early Christmas service, and had his pupils design bright patterns for them; the next year more than a hundred went to church. In 1915 his school also built a miniature scene of children with lanterns streaming out of the lit village church after the Christmas service. It still stands in the toy museum.

The 1920s and 1930s brought crisis. In the world depression after 1929, unemployment in the toy district reached 60 percent. Seiffen, its school director wrote in 1935, had come through better than other toy regions because it had taken up artistic Christmas and gift articles. The first series of commercially made pyramids in Seiffen dates from 1923; the first giant outdoor town pyramids went up in 1933–34; and in 1937 the Leipzig artist Paula Jordan designed the candle arch that became the best known of all, two miners between a woodcarver and a lace-maker, for a Christmas exhibition in Schwarzenberg.

These were also the years of the Nazi regime, which promoted the Erzgebirge as Saxony’s model “Christmas land.” Several of the region’s best-known forms took their classic shape then, which is a reminder that these traditions were never fixed; they have always been changing.

After 1945, in what became East Germany, the industry was reorganized step by step. Some firms were expropriated in 1946; independent craftsmen were grouped into production cooperatives in the 1950s; and in 1972 the last private and semi-private firms were turned into “people’s enterprises.” A state toy combine based in Olbernhau absorbed many small workshops; in 1981 it had about 3,600 employees at 96 sites. Machines took over more of the work, though a nutcracker still took “over a hundred work steps.”

Much of what the workshops made went abroad. Smokers were so much in demand in West Germany, Italy and Austria that many were exported, and at home a candle arch was, like so much else, hard to get. Many families sawed their own with a fretsaw.

After 1990 the state structures collapsed; firms were returned to private hands and new workshops were founded. The makers’ trade association counts some 30,000 different products today, more than two-thirds of them designed since 1990.

In 2022 Saxony counted 424 woodcraft businesses on its register of crafts, 244 of them in the Erzgebirge district, earning more than 50 million euros a year. About a fifth of the work is exported, and the most important market abroad is the United States and Canada. Most of the makers are small family businesses; the largest employ about a hundred people, the smallest just one.

The craft is still taught. A vocational school in Seiffen, reopened in 1995, is the only school in Germany that trains wooden-toy makers; some 15 to 20 apprentices finish its three-year course each year. In 2025 the Erzgebirge’s woodcraft was entered in Germany’s national register of intangible cultural heritage.

Life in the workshops