By Isla Quinn
Thin glass, blown over a flame, silvered inside. That is the bauble. It also has a surprisingly tangled history.
The town
Lauscha is a town in the Sonneberg district of Thuringia. Wikipedia places it at an elevation of 625 metres, 13 kilometres north of Sonneberg and 24 kilometres south-west of Saalfeld, with 3,173 residents in 2023 and an area of 18.72 square kilometres. It says the stream is first documented as lutzscha in 1366, and that the town belonged to Saxe-Meiningen from 1680 to 1920. It is known, Wikipedia says, for glassblowing, especially Christmas baubles.
What a glassmaker needed
Wikipedia lists the requirements: clean water, sand from the Steinheid quarry, natron, potash and timber. It says five mills once stood in the town and are now closed. The railway arrived at the turn of the twentieth century. After 1952, the article says, Lauscha belonged to Bezirk Suhl in East Germany, until Thuringia was restored in 1990. The town sits in the Thuringian Highland, and its highest point, the Pappenheimer Berg, reaches 835 metres. Wikipedia also notes that the town features in a novel, The Glassblower, by Petra Durst-Benning, first published in German in 2003.
1597, and the licence
The Museum für Glaskunst Lauscha, in its Thuringia tourism listing, says that in 1597 the Duke of Saxe-Coburg gave Hans Greiner, and a partner whose name the excerpt cuts off, permission to build a glass furnace in Lauscha. That marks, it says, the start of the town as a glassmaking centre. The museum documents Thuringian glassmaking from the twelfth century on.
More than baubles
The museum lists glass eyes, produced since 1832, technical glass including thermometers, reagent tubes and ampoules, drinking vessels and wedding glasses, blown animals and thread glass, and Christmas ornaments, which it calls renowned since 1860. It dates lamp-glassblowing to the mid-eighteenth century, and says the furnaces changed from oil to gas after 1867. The ornament business grew out of a town that already worked glass for other purposes.
A coloured-glass works
A Thuringia tourism listing describes a coloured-glass works in the town, founded in 1853, and credits the founder’s family with inventing the glass marble. We have not checked that claim against another source. The listing says the glass is melted at 1,500 degrees Celsius from sand, soda, potash, lime and coloured oxides. It also says visitors can watch glassmakers from a furnace gallery on most mornings, see lamp-workers at the bench through the day, and, from the age of seven, blow a sphere themselves. It adds a twelve-minute presentation on glass history, a museum for glass art and a shop floor of more than 900 square metres. That is the works’ own description, in a tourism listing, and we are not recommending it or quoting hours.
1847, or perhaps not
Homes and Antiques magazine says a Hans Greiner began in 1847 to make Christmas ornaments in the shape of fruit and nuts, hand-blown into moulds and silvered inside with a mixture of silver nitrate and sugar water. Wikipedia’s article on Christmas ornaments names Hans Greiner too, and says Lauscha silvering was developed in the 1850s by Justus von Liebig. It also dates the invention of the mould-blown coloured ornament to the mid-sixteenth century, which fits neither the museum’s 1597 licence nor the magazine’s 1847. We do not know whether the two Hans Greiners were related, or whether these sources are describing different things, so we are reporting the dates and the disagreement rather than choosing one.
The export years
The magazine says Lauscha exported ornaments to Britain in the 1870s and that F.W. Woolworth started exports to America in 1879. Wikipedia places Woolworth’s first sales of the glass ornaments in 1880. The magazine adds that Woolworth built a trade that lasted until the First World War.
Nationalisation and return
After the Second World War, the magazine says, the East German government nationalised the old glass workshops and production switched to machines. Wikipedia describes the state taking over most glassworks and says baubles ceased to be made in Lauscha. After 1989, both sources say, privately run firms were re-established, around twenty or so, and many make handmade decorations in the traditional manner. Wikipedia counts about 20 small firms active as of 2009. We have not checked the current number.
The market
Every November, the magazine says, Lauscha holds its Christmas Kugelmarkt, or bauble market. We have not checked current dates.
Why the dates disagree
Craft histories gather dates the way old workshops gather soot. A town is licensed in 1597, a family claims a fruit-shaped ornament in 1847, an encyclopedia gives a sixteenth-century mould, and all three can be partly right, because each describes a different step: the furnace, the mould, the silvering, the export order. Wikipedia lists the manufacturer and National Liberal politician Eduard Müller, who lived from 1855 to 1912, and the soprano Ursula Buckel, who lived from 1926 to 2005, among the town’s notable people, a reminder that Lauscha was a living town and not only a glass workshop. We would rather show you the gaps than paper over them.
What to ask
Is it mouth-blown or machine-made? Was it made in Lauscha, or only sold from there? Who made it, and in which workshop? How was it silvered? Is it a new piece or an older one? Our sources do not say how a buyer can verify the answers. We are not naming a firm, a workshop or a price.
Roam first. Shop later.
If you work in glass in Thuringia, the process for getting listed is at /sell-with-sephari/