Doll Development in 1900–1945 Period

German bisque dolls continued to be produced into the war years, and the industry remained a crucially important one to the national economies of the Second and Third Reichs as well as the Weimar Republic. The doll trade halted due not to lack of infrastructure, but to lack of manpower because of military conscription. Despite popular belief, the doll factories were neither bombed by the Allies nor substantially looted by the Russians for plant and equipment in the postwar years. Only after the post-1989 reunification were the production lines stripped and the buildings razed for property speculation and other newly arisen opportunities for short-term capital gain, and only then was the capacity for doll production rendered apparently unfeasible. There is a persistent myth that some factories resumed production-even during the Eastern bloc years-with their output directed to the adult collector market, not to girls, which now floods eBay and antique auctions and fairs in the United States and elsewhere.

As these items are sold as “antiques,” their corporate and craft network origins are generally denied, with the products claimed to have emerged from pre-World War II “hidden storehouses.” Thus the seemingly irrelevant child’s doll has become part of the complex, unstable experience of the Eastern bloc’s adaptation to capitalist processes and values. If the old doll factories were manufacturing “antiques” for cash-laden United States buyers, then the doll played its part in economically supporting the East German state, just as it did the previous German regimes. Likewise, the extensive cultural and economic capital contributions of the doll and toys generally to the United States throughout the middle and late twentieth century should not be overlooked.

During World War II, dolls in military dress reflected the times and notably included the new female service personnel. In the United States dolls again performed functions in adult as well as in play cultures as they featured prominently in domestic “shrines” to service personnel on active duty overseas, serving as a more tangible, three-dimensional touchstone to the absent relative than a photograph. Paper dolls became popular due to wartime shortages of materials. Just as in the Depression when their price made paper dolls the only dolls that poorer families could afford for their daughters, they were often the only new doll product that was freely available. In both Allied and Axis countries, older nineteenth-century porcelain dolls, with or without fashionable makeovers such as shorter haircuts and modern dress, were given to girls as compensation for the lack of new product or the limitations on purchases due to rationing. Small dolls also were used as good-luck mascots to protect against injury, as they had in the previous world war by both civilians and combatants. In World War II such dolls as well as teddy bears were favored by pilots and rode in many a warplane.