Smoking Men

Men started smoking pipes in the Ergebirge Mountains when the fashion came over from England at the beginning of the 19th century. This way of smoking was soon seen in the manufacture of wooden figurines, too. The first smoking men were made in the village of Heidelberg near Seiffen around 1850. A toy-maker by the name of Ferdinand Frohs launched a large variety of them together with his nephew Gotthelf Friedrich Haustein. They took the idea from figurines made of paper, which had been known to a place called Sonneberg in southern Turingia for some twenty or thirty years. Up to about 1920, the smoking figurines showed arms, legs, and partially even faces of a kind of dough which featured a blend of whitewash, bone glue, saw dust or rye flour, and sugar loaf paper made into little pieces and cooked in soda water. The figurine components were moulded and took up to four days to dry. Only then they could be further used. Haustein’s son, his daughter-in-law and his granddaughter continuing on their ancestor’s way, the tradition died after nearly 100 years in 1948. However, other manufacturers had come up. Their smoking men showed simple shapes.

Contrary to the grim-looking nutcrackers, the design of smoking men referred to well-known and well-liked village people such as the chimneysweep, the postman, the miner, the forest-worker, and a range of characters coming over from Bohemia: the brush-maker, the peddlar, and the craftsman on the road. It takes skilful wood-turning to make the trades easily visible in just a few characteristic features. Clothes are often depicted as uniforms and show but little decoration. One thing, of course, is common with all of the variants: the open mouth with the pipe.

The first non-Erzgebirge character to be depicted was the Turk, who the manufacturers were familiar with in the context of the Christmas story and Christmas cribs.Novel designs have been known since the sixties of the 20th century. Inspired by them as well as by state-of-the-art technical facilities and the run for new markets, first prototypes of smoking men made by Müller were created in the nineties. Since 2004, they have been constantly available in a large range of sizes. Their design has been refined, rich decoration and round bellies being especially characteristic. We have launched novel shapes and detail components such as carved feet. They are registered design elements.

Here you will find hints and tips from the incense candle manufacturer on how a smoking man best smokes. (in German only)