Josef Wackerle

He came from a village at the foot of the Alps where carving was simply what men did. Josef Wackerle was born on 15 May 1880 in Partenkirchen — his grandfather a woodcarver, his father a builder — and at thirteen he was already at the local woodcarving school, learning to take material away from a block until a shape appeared. He never really stopped doing that.

Munich took him next: the Kunstgewerbeschule, the school of applied arts, and then the Academy. What happened after was unusually fast. At twenty-six he was made artistic director of the Nymphenburg porcelain manufactory — one of Europe's grand old works, in the hands of a young man from the mountains. Porcelain is a brutal teacher. Every figure has to be modelled to survive a kiln that shrinks and warps it, so the sculptor learns to think in confident, simplified volumes. That habit runs through everything Wackerle made afterward, coins included.

From 1913 he taught in Berlin at the Kunstgewerbemuseum's school, becoming a professor. He returned to Munich in 1917 to take a chair at the applied-arts school, and from 1924 to 1950 he taught at the Munich Academy — a quarter-century at the centre of Bavarian sculpture, with a long line of students behind him. In between he made the public work he is best remembered for at home: horse-taming fountains in Schweinfurt and Kassel, the Neptune Fountain in Munich's Botanical Garden of 1937, and much later, in 1954, the Three Fates fountain in Dublin.

The rest of the record has to be said plainly. Wackerle prospered under the Nazi regime. He belonged to the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, showed repeatedly in the regime's Great German Art Exhibitions, received the Goethe Medal for Art and Science on his sixtieth birthday in 1940 at Hitler's own proposal, and in 1944 was placed on the Gottbegnadeten-Liste — the list of artists the state deemed indispensable and shielded from war service. He kept working after 1945 and was honoured again by the city of Munich in 1953. He died in Partenkirchen on 20 March 1959, in the town where he was born.

The eagle is the thing to look at, because Wackerle's version of it did a political job no committee could have done with words.

Imperial German coinage carried a crowned, armoured, heraldic bird — heavy with regalia, unmistakably a monarch's animal. Article 109 of the Weimar constitution had banned the state from handing out orders and decorations, which is why the republic invented an honorary gift instead: the Adlerschild des Deutschen Reiches, an eagle shield, instituted by President Friedrich Ebert on 15 November 1922. It was a bronze disc 108 millimetres across, cast from Wackerle's model. Edwin Redslob, the republic's Reichskunstwart — its official arbiter of state design, a job Weimar genuinely invented — described the result as wings joined like a Gothic pointed arch, the whole thing taut and rising: an emblem meant to carry the idea of the Reich rather than merely illustrate a heraldic beast.

Strip the crown, flatten the ornament, spread the wings, and you have a bird a republic can put its name under. That is the design argument, and it is why Wackerle's eagle kept turning up on money. It sits on the aluminium 3 Mark of 1922–23, the inflation-era coin whose reverse legend marks VERFASSUNGSTAG 11. AUGUST 1922 — constitution day. It sits on the aluminium 500 Mark of 1923, a coin whose face value evaporated before most of it left the mint. And it sits, in a more settled form, on the silver 5 Reichsmark "Eichbaum" of 1927–1933, where Wackerle's eagle occupies one side and Maximilian Dasio's oak tree the other. Everywhere it appears the same idea repeats: an emblem, not a coat of arms.

Wackerle also worked in the older, denser mode when the subject called for it. On the 1928 3 Reichsmark for Dinkelsbühl's thousandth anniversary — credited to him alongside the Munich architect and designer Karl Roth, with the working dies cut by the Berlin mint's Reinhard Kullrich — the town side is all solid modelling: wall, towers, a man with a sickle and a sheaf standing in front of them like a small piece of relief sculpture rather than a drawing. The porcelain modeller's hand shows in how bodily that figure is against the flat wall behind him.

One more detail closes the story. From 1934 the Adlerschild's eagle — Wackerle's eagle — was replaced with a Reichsadler that better matched Nazi ideology. The bird that had been designed to say republic was the first thing the new state took off.