Waltershausen created the finest quality and most enduringly beautiful dolls of Germany. Ironically, the neglect of a half-century of Soviet occupation serves the doll afficionado well in that many of the old doll factory buildings still stand.

     August Trinius, a citizen and chronicler of early 20th-century Waltershausen, offers us a vivid image of this doll city on the northernmost edge of the Thüringer Wald. He writes:

"The doll is the coat of arms, the distinctive mark of Waltershausen, a city that one may rightly call a giant doll room. I will not estimate how many millions of dolls are born here annually. I know only that the entire little mountain city is marked by dolls and that one can wander nowhere without coming across traces of this activity which serves only one object and has so many ramifications. Even the air is filled with dolls, for when one rambles through the side streets along the confusion of factory buildings, one is surrounded by a sour_sharp odor which streams from the lacquer and paints with which charm and life come into the marble_pale faces of dolls. But Waltershausen is not alone in the production of its dolls. A multitude of poor forest villages, whose miserable soil and weather conditions allow only the cultivation of potatoes and summer rye, are also occupied on behalf of the doll factories of Waltershausen. The reasonable price of the dolls is achieved not only through low wages and the occupation of the entire family — to the smallest child — in doll production, but also through the division of labor whereby one human hand performs the same activity, year_in and year_out. Thus there are villages that carve only legs, arms, or joints. Here cases are made. There the cases are filled with sawdust_filled bodies. One hand, with drowsy melancholy, dips great white heads formed from a paper_like mass into a bowl full of flesh_colored 'sauce', day after day. The other hand sets head next to head in low, broad wooden boxes which find a place, one on top of another, in tall racks. Wherever this activity is carried on as a home industry, window sills, door steps, garden fences, and house fronts are decorated with rows of flesh_colored doll heads and body parts. Then the artists get their chance. One paints eyebrows with spirit and verve; another one roguish dimples in chin and cheeks; another conjures up roses on well_nourished, chubby faces, and yet another makes two rows of glittering teeth appear between cherry lips."

     The 12th-century castle fortress of Schloß Tenneberg houses a little Heimatmuseum and some fine examples of the Waltershausen doll industry. Don't miss the original carved wood bust of the well-known Kestner "Hilda" character doll. Could this be the master die of one of the original molds? Also, look for the rare and unusual papier-mâché man with the moveable jaw. Our host, Herr Dr. Thomas Reinecke, opens up the palace chapel and ballroom for us to see. These magnificent rooms are currently under restoration.

     Waltershäuser Puppenmanufaktur carries on the doll-making tradition begun 195 years ago by Johann Daniel Kestner. WPM is known not only for its production of Günzel, Scholz and Kißling artist dolls, but also for its reproductions of Kestner, Kämmer & Reinhardt and Simon & Halbig dolls, models of which you will find in the factory salesroom.

     Our tour of the historic doll factories is on foot and everything we want to see is within a ½-square-mile area. See if you can spot the Kestner trademark Krone; the "1907, KR" on the Kämmer & Reinhardt Puppenfabrik; the three ceramic dolls on the Adolf Heller Puppenfabrik; and the numerous house signs indicating the Hugo Wiegand Puppenfabrik, the Otto Gans Puppenfabrik, the Adolf Hülß Fabrik von Puppen und Babies, and the Koenig & Wernicke GmbH Puppenfabrik. If you take a snapshot of the Bruno Schmidt Puppenfabrik and compare it to the 1910 photograph in Cieslik’s "German Doll Encyclopedia," you’ll find it hasn’t changed a bit. Neither has the first Heinrich Handwerck, and subsequently Kämmer & Reinhardt, factory building on the corner of Mühlgasse and Burggasse changed in 100 years.

     Dinner at the Hotel Landgraf is followed by a dessert of hot rasberries over rich, vanilla ice cream called "Heiße Liebe," or "Hot Love," a source of mirth for all!