This book is the publication of Kluge's 2018 Habilitationsschrift in economic history at the University of Regensburg. With an additional library science degree, he is the municipal archivist in Hof in northeastern Bavaria, close to the former border dividing Germany, thus to the porcelain-production region roughly identical with the modern German state of Thuringia. Kluge privileges this region, along with Upper Franconia, the Upper Palatinate, and western Bohemia, despite its products’ middling material and artistic quality (188), in order to study the network of competing small- and medium-scale enterprises founded mainly by private citizens instead of monopolizing aristocratic courts, such as Meissen in Saxony and KPM Berlin in Brandenburg-Prussia. While suggesting no interest in porcelain as an art, Kluge's focus especially on Central Germany has much to teach art historians working in the field of porcelain history.
That a Habilitationsschrift rarely makes for an accessible book holds true for Kluge's. His dedication to his topic is evident on every page and yet dampened for the reader by the study's rigidly methodical structure and unwieldy abundance of detail. Both are grounded in the immense archival research Kluge conducted on porcelain production from its beginnings in Dresden 1708 to almost everywhere by 1914. Introductory and concluding chapters frame three long core chapters, titled “The Early German Hard-paste Porcelain Manufactories,” “The German Porcelain-producing Regions,” and “The Industrial Age.” These are sparely illustrated, mainly with maps, representations of kilns, factory floors, storage spaces, and groups of employees. The book includes a useful glossary and extensive appendices of statistics tables. In each core chapter, Kluge surveys a kaleidoscope of contributing factors, including foundation, development, natural resources, fuel materials, firing technology, training, employment, production, products, distribution, and marketing. Some factors are unique to region or era, such as the founding privilege granted by an aristocratic sovereign, the essential role of the arcanist, and the mercantilist laws regulating trade in the eighteenth century, in contrast to free enterprise and trade, exchange of technical knowledge, and growing international export in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; or the enormous wastefulness in the early years of porcelain production, as compared to the closer alignment of technology, productivity, and profitability in the industrial age. Other factors, though, are constants throughout, such as the important Greiner family network in and radiating out of Thuringia, the continuous improvement of energy technology and kiln efficiency everywhere, and the stratified categorization of marketed wares ranking from “fine ware” (Feingut) to “average ware” (Mittelgut) to “flawed ware” (Ausschuss) in both the 1750s and the 1880s.
Skeptical of monocausal explanations, Kluge emphasizes the confluence of historical and regional conditions, including access to natural resources, fuel, and transportation on waterway or railway, workforce recruitment, and the impact of internal and external forces. At the same time, he aims to demonstrate what may be unique about the history of porcelain production, namely, that it does not follow a progression or even shift from craft trade to industry. Instead, from the outset this was an industry with a strict organization and crucial focus on technology. It required specialized skills coordinated within a hierarchical structure ranging from sheer physical labor to sophisticated art and design. From early on, it diversified production to include luxury consumer goods for use and display at court, or to serve as gifts in court or state diplomacy, and soon added so-called Sanitätsporzellan (healthy porcelain, i.e., everyday tableware of lesser material quality and fired at lower temperatures, hence affordable to the middling classes interested in replacing the commonly used ceramics glazed with a toxic lead component) as well as mass products, including doll parts, Türkenkoppchen (coffee cups) mass-exported to the Ottoman Empire, pipe bowls, lab and apothecary vessels, and eventually industrial porcelain, such as electric insulators.
Kluge presents detailed information on production methods and technology, and a myriad of personal, company and place names either in long lists or in narrated clusters of local interdependence. The attentive reader will get to know these names and enterprises as they reappear under topical rubrics repeated in each core chapter. Still, Kluge's evenly compartmentalized treatment risks draining the life from his topic. That unlike most literature on porcelain history his book does not privilege court culture and production over middleclass entrepreneurship makes for its interest and originality, yet also challenges the reader in need of reorienting guidance. Kluge details but also sets aside the zealous entrepreneurship of Frederic the Great who commanded Jews and lottery organizers to buy and re-sell stipulated quantities of porcelain, measures still making him his own best client, and he keeps references to the passionate porcelain collector August the Strong' foundation of the Meißen manufactory to the absolute minimum. The court culture of porcelain collection plays no role in Kluge's book. Yet also facts about the anonymous workforce, such as some men's seasonal turn from porcelain to gun manufacturing, youth prison and orphanage labor, and the home industry of women and children decorating dolls' heads or polishing handles are detailed without further interpretation. In these and other instances Kluge's consistent abstention from evaluative commentary may frustrate a reader interested in the social and cultural fabric of porcelain production and consumption.
Some scholarly decisions remain unexplained. It is puzzling, for example, that for this entire history, covering the period from 1708 till 1914, Kluge defines Germany as the German Reich within the borders of 1871. He rather briefly adumbrates important topics in his closing chapters, such as globalization in contradistinction to internationalization, the German porcelain industry's contribution to deforestation and pollution, and the health hazard to which it exposed employees, a high percentage of whom suffered from silicosis, not tuberculosis, as the bacteriologist Robert Koch recognized. Only in the final pages does Kluge position his book as a contribution to the long-neglected history of the small- and medium-scale enterprise (KMU) in the context of capitalist industrialization. A reader coming to this book from other fields of historical inquiry might have welcomed knowing earlier about this goal pursued, despite the many named individuals and social groups, with a primary emphasis on production.
Kluge's initial questions and sustained attention focus on the relation of manufactory to industry and porcelain production's unique difference from other industries. In his final Ausblick (outlook), before discussing the field of KMU studies, he poignantly rephrases his second question, judging it still open, to ask whether porcelain production offers general insights or is just “the intersection of rocks and earths with a predominant orientation toward luxury consumer goods” (329, translation C.H.). If the answer may be sought in the intersection of economic and social valuation, then Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (book 11, chapter XIV) offers the answer: it is both. As Napoleon's army approaches Moscow and the Rostov family prepares and packs for their flight, Natasha decides to repack the valuables: the Kiev plates are unpacked, but the Meissen service is wrapped in the best rugs and crated. In the end, all luxury goods are left behind so as to transport as many wounded soldiers out of the city as possible.
