Handmade in Germany
Erzgebirge Mountain Workshop
Permit me, dear reader, an awkwardness. To write about oneself — or rather, to write about a carved likeness of oneself — is to stare into a mirror that does not flinch. Christian Ulbricht's workshop in Seiffen has rendered me in the uniform I prefer: the tall red top hat with its green band at the base, the dark frock coat, the maroon cape with its red satin lining turned just enough at the shoulder to suggest motion, and — of course — the white lace jabot cascading from the throat in the manner of a gentleman who has somewhere to be by candlelight.
Observe, if you will, the details that separate this figure from its imitators. In the right hand he holds a small carved nutcracker — a figure within a figure, the gift for Clara captured mid-delivery, the entire Hoffmann tale compressed into a two-inch carving. In the left, a dark walking cane. At the waist, a gold pocket watch on its chain, because a clockmaker who does not carry time on his person is no clockmaker at all. The one visible blue eye is rendered so that the other reads as shadowed — the monocle effect, the suggestion of an eyepatch, the half-glance that has unsettled three generations of children in the ballet's first scene. That is Ulbricht's restraint at work. A lesser workshop would have painted a patch and called it finished.
I keep this version on the desk in the old library, the one with the clockwork door. He arrived on a Tuesday. On Wednesday, the small nutcracker in his hand was pointed at a different shelf than the one I had left him facing. I have not moved him since.
— Uncle Drosselmeyer
