In 1865 Moritz Gottschalk - born 1840 - founded a bookbinding shop
in the small town Marienberg in the Ore Mountains of Germany.
From 1873 on he produced dollshouses and other toys.
When two years later the railway came
to Marienberg the factory grew larger and larger.
They exported to England, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and America.
That is why Gottschalk doll houses can be found all over the world.
In some capitals were showrooms of his products
and in the USA was an agency of his firm.
His doll houses were world famous.
The architectural styles of each period were transfered to the miniature houses.
The wooden dollhouses were often pasted with lithographic paper,
which imitated the facades of the time.
Windows at the sides of the building were sometimes only drawn on the paper.
Until about 1919 the roofs were blue after that they were red.
Many doll houses were marked underneath
with a number which can be found in the catalogues.
The designers' inventiveness was unlimited:
abundantly decorated, huge and luxurious dolls mansions,
but also the small cottage, houses with a dolls' lift,
with extricable or hinged gardens, with electric light,
with moveable awnings, even round room boxes or dollhouses, caravans, kitchens,
foldable room boxes, school rooms, baths, stables, later garages, castles,
shops of any kind, from the butcher's to the apothecary's,
from the magnificent pastry shop with café to a grand department store,
or a market hall, a farm, a house boat, an airport, a theatre or a garden with pavillons.
Furniture by Moritz Gottschalk
Christian Hacker and Albin Schönherr were further
world-famous dollhouse manufacturers of that period.
Schönherr was a former employee of Moritz Gottschalk
and many of his dollhouses are barely distinguishable from Gottschalk's houses.
What is more, naturally other companies copied the style of the period,
too, thus complicating the identification even more.
1905 Moritz Gottschalk died but the company remained family-owned,
first by his son, who died in WWI, then by his widow.
Since 1931 a former employee, Kurt Alfred Wagner, owned the firm.
He retired in 1934 and his son was the next to lead the business.
He married a granddaughter of the founder Moritz Gottschalk, Lotte Haunstein.
During the world wars the production stopped.
After WWI it took some time before a new catalogue was published,
and the first catalogues assumed the pre-war style.
But after 1923 there were only newly designed models to be found in the catalogues.
After WWII this toy manufacture, too, was in the eastern zone of occupied Germany
and the Soviets disassembled large parts of still existing factories
to ship them to the Soviet Union as a form of reparations.
Nevertheless from 1947 on the Moritz Gottschalk company built dollhouses again.
The end of the long-established firm came 1972
when all remaining private enterprises of the
German Democratic Republic were dispossessed and nationalized.
Toy companies were incorporated in the nationally-owned enterprise VERO.
Until 1990 they continued to build single toy parts in Marienberg,
then the fall of the iron curtain stopped the production.
The remaining buildings were demolished in 1999 to make room for a sports hall.
The history of the once famous toy company
was almost forgotten after reunification.
Even the collector scene of antique doll's houses,
which paid small fortunes for old Gottschalk houses
(in 2000, a large house that could be played with from four sides
house was sold for DM 48,000 at Theriault),
had little information about the most famous manufacturer of their objects.
As Claus Leichsenring explained in 2013,
and as I also followed in the collectors' magazines of the time,
the impetus for a historical reappraisal came from an American woman,
herself an artist, but also a collector with a great thirst for research:
Evelyn Ackerman.
Her book "The Genius of Moritz Gottschalk" from 1994
featured photographs and a series of catalogue pages from 1895 and 1896,
which were found in the estate of a former commercial agent.
She developed the term doll's houses with
blue and
red roofs.
The beginning of a chronological classification. This is how it began.
https://issuu.com/theriaults/docs/smallcourtesiesThe next treasure was found by
Marianne and Jürgen Cieslik.
Probably as an effect of the reunification, 3000 photo negatives from the company,
which produced the catalogues for Gottschalk for decades,
Paul Knäbchen in Zöblitz, were to be destroyed.
As a well-known collector/publisher couple, they were told about it.
They published a selection in 2000.
After the publication of this book, the collector scene was finally able to determine
whether their houses were really from Gottschalk and exactly how old they were.
However, not all of the catalogue pages found were actually printed.
There was later a reprint catalogue volume published by
Swantje Köhler,
because she had found old catalogues at a flea market.
Nevertheless, the Gottschalk documentation is still not complete.
More photos Of course you can look for photos in the archives of all toy auction houses,
as the Gottschalk objects are often recognised.
In the
Vecties-Auktionshaus you can see the dark side
of toy production in Marienburg,
War toys and swastika.
The company had always produced children's war toys.
In 1933 the company name was
"Factory of fine wooden toys and children's military articles".
Advertisements in the trade journal
"Wegweiser für Spielzeug" in 1938
advertise Gottschalk's Wehrmacht articles.
After the Second World War, there were no more adverts for war toys.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Bibliography:
1994 Evelyn Ackermann "The genius of Moritz Gottschalk"
2000 "Moritz Gottschalk 1892 - 1931"
2003 Marianne Cieslik, Swantje Köhler "Lexikon der Puppenstuben und Puppenhäuser"
2004 Femmie Markestein, Karin Wester: "Poppenhuizen 1880-1980"
2013 Leichsenring, Claus: Von Marienberg in alle Welt - Spielwaren von Moritz Gottschalk. In: Erzgebirgische Heimatblätter : Zeitschrift für Heimatfreunde. 2013, Heft 6, Seite 2 bis 5
2016 Knoll, Ulrike: Vom Kindertraum zum Sammlerobjekt : Puppenstuben,
Puppenhäuser & weitere Erzeugnisse der Spielwarenfabrik Moritz
Gottschalk Marienberg aus der Sammlung Knoll = From childhood dream to
collector's item. Dresden: radicula Verlag. ISBN 9783000544064
Dolls' Houses Past & Present
A website and e-zine about dolls' houses: antique, vintage and modern.
Plus furniture and accessories.
The blog post has been greatly shortened by me, in March 2024,
as Google Photos had classified many of my old photos
as not secure and therefore no longer displayed them.
However, many photos are on the website mentioned above.
In July 2024 I added information about important books.
.JPG)
.jpg)
