Folk art – When the Raacherweibl naablt

Typical man: Stands around in the room on Christmas Eve but can’t open his mouth. The “mouth,” as the lyrics say, is open, wide even. “Schwoden” rise from this to the ceiling, filling the room with scent. But that’s the only contribution the guy makes to the Christmas event: He “nabelt un sat kaa Wort drzu”, as they say in Erzgebirge – he fogs up and doesn’t say a word about it. If you were to maintain gender stereotypes, you might say with a shrug: men. In this case, as the title of the song suggests, it is “’s Raachermannl”, the smoker.

There are hardly any alternatives: smoking women are rarely found, and when they are, “they are full of clichés,” says Melanie Hühn. The cultural scientist noticed this when, at a previous celebration, she unpacked the Christmas decorations that she had inherited or bought over the years. For Hühn, who worked at the Chair of Intercultural Communication at Chemnitz University of Technology, this also includes Erzgebirge folk art. And because diversity is an important topic for her, she was struck by how bad things are when it comes to festive decorative items: “I found it strange that there are no nutcrackers and hardly any smoker women.”

Because scientists do not simply take note of such phenomena, but rather try to get to the bottom of them, Hühn designed a specialist seminar called “Smoking Chemnitzer:in”, which dealt with folk art and handicrafts in the Erzgebirge and contributes to greater diversity in this area wanted. It was funded as the university’s contribution to 2025, Chemnitz’s year as European Capital of Culture.

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Chemnitz is heavily influenced by mechanical and automotive engineering and is “a very masculine city,” says Hühn. Your students conducted a survey of well-known people from Chemnitz. Apart from the figure skater Katharina Witt, there were only men among those mentioned. “Women are severely underrepresented here,” says Hühn. The Capital of Culture could be an opportunity to change that, especially since its motto is: “C the unseen”, i.e. see the unseen. Since the capital includes the region and thus the Ore Mountains, it made sense to take a closer look at its cultural heritage and breathe a breath of fresh air into it.

For the seminar, Hühn and her students immersed themselves in specialist literature on the topic and went on excursions to the Museum of Saxon Folk Art or to artisans in the Ore Mountains. They found explanations for why, at least originally, women were not represented in the Christmas decorations. Nutcrackers, says Hühn, always represented representatives of the authorities: kings, military officers, gendarmes. These were social positions that were historically reserved for men.

Smokers, on the other hand, when they came onto the market in the middle of the 19th century, represented simple people in their respective lives: hunters and chimney sweeps, bird dealers and postmen. At first it seems “strange” that there are no women among them, says Hühn. However, their most important utensil is a pipe, “and smoking one was reserved for men for a long time,” says Hühn.

This only changed in the 1920s, when the cigarette became the symbol of the modern city dweller. According to a cultural history on the subject, women who smoke were “first considered immoral, then they became sex symbols.” This was hardly reflected in the traditional ensemble of Erzgebirge incense figures. There is the dumpling woman with steam coming out of the bowl, or the grandmother in the rocking chair, next to her is the flower woman with a cigarette and a few other female figures. But most of them “seem very stereotypical,” says Hühn. »It doesn’t appeal to me much.«

“We were accused of destroying the Erzgebirge tradition.”

Melanie HenCultural scientist

The four figures that emerged from the seminar are different. These are women and a queer person beyond clichéd role assignments. “Empowerella” shows a musician with a guitar who is inspired by the Chemnitz women’s band Blond. She leans casually against the colorful power plant chimney that has become the city’s landmark and shows “feminine characteristics, but without the typical, stereotypical body proportions,” says the description. There is also a professor and a Vietnamese nurse – as well as, with “Burning Gender,” an attempt to create a character in which “gender becomes something secondary.”

When the figures, which were created by the art designer Markus Weber from Schneeberg based on student designs, were presented publicly in Chemnitz, there were many positive reactions, reports Hühn. “We started talking to the mainly older visitors about topics such as gender and migration,” she says. The response online was completely different. When MDR briefly reported on the exhibition, there were thousands of comments, many of them hateful. “We were accused of destroying the Erzgebirge tradition.”

However, she always openly dealt with social developments, says the scientist Nadine Kulbe: “It was never something static.” Kulbe works at the Institute for Saxon History and Folklore at the TU Dresden, is actually a photography expert, but has dealt with it The topic of Erzgebirge folk art was occupied when Pegida emerged in 2015. The Islamophobic movement also provided its followers with Christmas decorations, such as an incense smoker made in Seiffen with a Pegida banner.

Kulbe found the motif all the more remarkable because Erzgebirge folk art has been “Islamized” since the “Smoked Turks” were created in the 19th century. Manufacturers used them to serve the “Turkish fashion” that was widespread in Europe. There were also oriental figures and scenes in nativity scenes, on pyramids and Christmas mountains that referred to the biblical Christmas story. During the Nazi era there were attempts to suppress them, says Kulbe. “Breads” with Germanic runes should hang on the Christmas tree. Even today’s most classic of all candle arches with miners, carvers and lace makers was designed during the Nazi years, when Erzgebirge motifs were supposed to replace previously popular depictions such as the saints from the Orient.

In younger years, artisans in the Erzgebirge repeatedly responded to political phenomena, says Kulbe. In addition to the Pegida figure, there were also candle arches with a “Refugees welcome” motif in 2015. Smoking men in the shape of the virologist Christian Drosten or Chancellor Angela Merkel with typical hand positions were sold well. There is therefore little to be said against including modern female figures, migrant or queer people in the Erzgebirge Christmas canon. »You just have to signal to the manufacturers that there is interest in it. They produce what there is demand for,” says Melanie Hühn, who also has a dream incense figure herself: “I would prefer one that can be designed differently every year with different accessories: in different jobs and sometimes as a woman, sometimes as Man.” The main thing is that it’s annoying.