In June this year I found myself sitting in the office of a small apartment in a suburban street of a dormitory town close to Munich. The owner was a large man and he could barely squeeze behind his desk. It was a very orderly space –
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family photographs arrayed carefully, a bookcase of tabulated journals and files. A glass case stretched along the whole wall containing models of deer and dogs and figurines, 18th-century soldiers, a shelf of vessels, vases and bowls, a chess set. They were made a mile away and this man was a collector and dealer. He sells this Allach Porzellan, he says, to Russians and Americans.
There is a serious market for porcelain made by slave labor in the Dachau concentration camp.
He was particularly proud of the chess set that had belonged to Heinrich Himmler. Its gilding was finer than any he had encountered before. It is not for sale. But I could buy the porcelain model of the fresh-faced Hitler Youth banging his drum, eyes on the future, noisy. 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.
He likes this porcelain, he tells me, because it is very well made. Porcelain is a very good German material. It has history. Above all, he repeats to me, it is pure.
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. 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. 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 thought that I understood the purity of porcelain and its attraction for so many people – to the point of obsession – for a thousand years. Porcelain comes from China. It was so rare, so arcane in medieval Europe, that to drink from porcelain was supposed to prevent poison. The story of its travels, of its trade, is one of desire. 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. It is alchemy.