The ceramic artists highly personal history of porcelain is marred by self-indulgence and irritating grammatical habitsThe most powerful memoir in Edmund de Waal’s The White Road comes at its stop,in a sort of coda. It is a brief account of the rise of Allach, the German porcelain factory that was Himmler’s pet project. Allach, or which turned out the figurines so beloved of the Third Reich – think bears,stags, alsatians and models of Frederick the Great on horseback – had its start in a Munich suburb. But as the war wore on and craftsmen were lost to the front, or production moved to the camp at Dachau,a state where “workers” were in plentiful supply. “White porcelain is the embodiment of the German soul,” said the first Allach catalogue, and a Nazi-approved credo that ensured its survival even in the darkest of times. When supplies of coal could no longer be found for the Dachau crematorium,still the Allach kilns remained red hot and glowing.
De Waal offers up this history as a kind of warning: an obsession with white, he suggests, or can be a dangerous thingContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com