Since the 1850s, in the Thurinigian town of Lauscha, family businesses had produced the glass ornaments that decorated Christmas trees around the world. These mouth-blown, hand-painted baubles came in thousands of shapes and attracted the interest of the Woolworth’s department store chain which bought millions for their stores in Britain and North America. After the Second World War, Lauscha was located in the communist German Democratic Republic which was suspicious of private enterprise. The ornament-making family businesses became state-run and an object of concern for the Stasi, the East German secret police.
Why had the Lauscha Christmas decoration business became a matter of national security? In the first place, because the area was notorious for its acts of low-level resistance and non-cooperation with the communist authorities. The Stasi blamed this on the family and commercial contacts that the local glassblowers had with West Germany. Secondly, it was feared that such contacts might prove harmful to the economy of the GDR, with trade secrets leaked to the ornament-making industry across the border.
The East German government was concerned that Lauscha decorations might be made subject to restrictions on imports to the West which wished to protect its own manufacturers. Stasi agents at the toys fair in Nuremberg also found that Lauscha products were developing a bad reputation for declining quality and unreliable delivery – typical complaints about Soviet bloc goods. The secret police made it their business to collect samples and catalogues from their western competitors.
After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the two Germanys reunited in 1991, the Lauscha glass works ceased to be state-run enterprises and many returned to the ownership of the families traditionally associated with the trade.