The Family Behind the First Traditional Nutcracker Is Still Making Them

06.12.2023 - 23:13 / atlasobscura.com

Markus Füchtner works the lathe in the workshop that doubles as his home—or maybe it’s his home that doubles as a workshop. The small, one-story building is set in the forested hills of Seiffen, near Germany’s border with Czechia, and has been used by his family of carpenters since 1786. It was here in the early 1870s that his great-great-great-grandfather, Wilhelm Füchtner, made his first nutcracker—and laid the foundation for a global Christmas icon.

Today, Markus Füchtner carries on that tradition, starting at the lathe. Sometimes he uses a foot-controlled antique that he restored in 2022; other times, he relies on a more modern, electric lathe, but his goal is always the same, he says: “I want to approach nutcrackers like in the past: old machines, good wood, and [producing] not many nutcrackers, but good ones.”

Reminders of the Füchtner family legacy are everywhere in the small building: Chisels passed down through the generations line the woodshop walls. In the assembly and painting room, six nutcrackers, each representing a different generation and adorned with a photo of their creator, watch the activity from a shelf.

The soldier-style nutcracker design now known the world over began in this small house in the Ore Mountains. As the name suggests, mining had long dominated the area, but the Füchtner family of carpenters built wooden homes. The work was more seasonal, and dropped off during the long, cold winter. “They needed to live,” says Marcus Füchtner. So, like other local woodcarvers, they created and sold toys and other small, wooden items.

Among those modest items were nutcrackers. Tools to break open nuts have been around since primates first began banging them against rocks, of course, but the earliest examples of instruments designed for the specific task look nothing like the nutcrackers that came marching out of the Füchtner workshop. A bronze and gold nutcracker found in southern Italy and dated to at least the third century BC, for example, is shaped like two forearms with elegant, clasped hands.

The Füchtner nutcrackers, with traditional military-style dress and expressionless faces, reflect the harsh reality of the industrial era in which they emerged, when elites generally enjoyed a comfortable life while workers toiled away, often performing hard physical labor in brutal conditions.

“It was a hard life,” says Füchtner. “There were tensions between the workers and the ruling class.”

Nutcrackers depicting authority figures began appearing in the mid-19th century, during the German Industrial Revolution, as a way to make fun of the ruling class and upend the system by having them “work” for the lower class, cracking nuts.

“The king must be working at Christmastime for the