Typically German?

What do the following have in common: a pink fluffy toilet seat cover patterned with carnations; a pair of slippers embroidered with the image of Barack Obama; an oil painting of a stag rising out of a lake? According to an instructive exhibition at Berlin’s small but charming “Museum der Dinge” (Museum of Objects), they are examples of Kitsch.

This is a big and serious subject: what constitutes “good” taste? What do we make of a society that delights in plastic gnomes or in salt-and-pepper pots in the shape of female breasts? There is, of course, nothing typisch deutsch about Kitsch. It is a universal phenomenon. In Britain, the acquisition of Kitsch often accompanies upward movement through the social classes. When workers in the 1970s found themselves able to buy their own small houses, they typically hung plaster ducks on their walls: they seemed like a sign of their new sophistication.

And when they travelled abroad in the 1960s, often for the first time since the war, they brought back gilt plastic gondolas from Venice and donkeys made from string from the Costa del Sol. One of my earliest memories was being given by a much-travelled aunt a small ball with a plastic rendition of the Alps inside. If you shook it, snow fell. And if you wound it up, it would yodel. I was a child and I was delighted; my parents were horrified and it was quickly exiled to the cellar.

Concerned with analysing its meaning

So no, there is nothing specifically German about Kitsch. But it is the Germans who are most concerned with analysing its meaning. For English speakers, the word is untranslatable. It seems to have entered the German language from Yiddish. Historically, it was used in the Munich art scene in the 1890s. Germany had a late industrial revolution and was later than most of its European neighbours in shaping its nation state. The country was in social flux. The new rich rose quickly but were unsure of their cultural bearings.

Country people poured into the cities; workers saved and became shopkeepers. The movement was faster than elsewhere, more intense. And so, naturally, they looked for guidance as to what constituted good behaviour, taste and style. The popular instinct was to buy things of sentimental value (and to listen to sentimental music and read literature that made the heart beat faster), things that made them feel secure and comforted. But most realised this was not the end of the story.

In 1912, the art historian Gustav Pazaurek set out a working definition of Kitsch: “The extreme counterpoint to artistic thought-through quality work is tasteless mass production or Kitsch. That does not concern itself with ethical, logical or aesthetic standards, that is not bothered by the sins it commits against material, technology and form and that demands only one thing: the object must be cheap and give at least the appearance of being more valuable than it really is.” (Guter und schlechter Geschmack im Kunstgewerbe)

Categories of Kitsch

The Museum of Objects in Berlin has taken Pazaurek’s definition and applied it to the modern world. When is something Kitsch and when is something merely bad taste? Who defines bad taste? If all this sounds a bit heavy well, that’s because it is: the Germans, typisch, typisch, are taking Kitsch seriously. And maybe the Germans are right. Why should we accept cultural trash in our lives, out of laziness or indifference. The museum curators analysed some of Pazaurek’s categories of Kitsch and found exhibits to match.

There is what he calls “Hurrakitsch”, triumphal Kitsch: plates with the face of Paul von Hindenburg – imagine eating from them – and shoe polish honouring German heroes (Deutsche Heldencreme) in 1941, matchboxes marked ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer’. Does this kind of Kitsch still exist? It does in America, where you can drink your coffee out of a Barack Obama mug. Europeans may have become immune to this sort of rubbish; too much blood has been spilled on the continent’s battlefields to celebrate heroes or leaders in such a trivial way. And somehow sipping tea out of a Angela Merkel cup doesn’t have quite the same feeling of transmitted glamour.

Religious Kitsch

We do however have plenty of the second category of Kitsch: “Devotionalienkitsch”, or religious Kitsch. For years I have thought of this as being the speciality of southern European Catholic countries. The three dimensional pictures of Jesus Christ for example, whose eyes follow you around the room. Those I remember from my time as a correspondent in Italy. Now, according to the Berlin Kitschologists the trend has spread to the protestant north. The museum exhibits a “Jesus the Champion” football scarf, a German credit-card holder depicting the Virgin Mary. Nowadays you can even buy pope Benedict bath foam. The “Fremdenandenkenkitsch” – the rubbishy souvenirs that so impressed me as a child – seem to be booming even in times of economic crisis.

Reaching back to lost world

But perhaps most close to the German heart is “Jägerkitsch”: all those antlers, and badly painted deer and wooden carvings of faithful hounds (there is a whole sub-genre of “Dackelkitsch”). Kitsch, it seems, reaches back to a lost world when childhood was innocent (all those paintings of big-eyed urchins without shoes) and when there were no profound doubts about nature, about national identity. Have you noticed how dictators love Kitsch, blazing sunsets, blue skies and honest workers? They strive for an intact, immaculate world (heile Welt) in which they serve as fathers of the nation to their child-like subjects. Kitsch, its fakeness, its deformation of art keeps people locked up by sentimentality. Yet it is part of all our lives. After visiting the Museum der Dinge I went through my apartment weaving more critical spectacles and found a pile of embarrassing cuddly bears (my dog used to play with them), some book-ends shaped like cats, a kitchen apron with the face of a West Highland Terrier, a key ring with a picture of Elvis. Where did it come from; why is it still there?

If you are in Berlin visit the Museum der Dinge and be prepared to embarrass yourself as you spot pretty-ugly (hübsch-hässliche) objects that are hidden and forgotten in your very own cellar.