Hummel Figurines

Abstract

How are we to understand the many-stranded, even contradictory, ways an artifact projects an ethnic image across the space of the contact zone? A staple of souvenir shops in German-American tourist towns and the focus of an entire museum in Texas, diminutive porcelain Hummel figurines have been selling an image of Germany to a world audience since their appearance in 1935. Various entities - corporate, civic, national - have sought to control or exploit the ethnic image that Hummels carry, molding them into what one might call ‘ideological souvenirs’. But what ideologies do they sell, what messages of ethnicity do they convey? Strategic efforts to deploy Hummels as ideological souvenirs run up against shifting historical conditions and conflicting interpretations of the figurines’ symbolic meanings. The moving target of historical reception thus exposes the dialectic of image-control and the resilient self-invention of the artifact.