Hempe, Muetzenmacherei

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 07-11-2009, 04:23 AM

Does anyone own a copy of this book?

**Espenlaub Militaria** · 07-11-2009 04:23 AM

We also buy and trade your items and full collections!

**stuka f** · 07-11-2009, 07:17 AM

No!

**Dimas** · 07-11-2009, 07:58 AM

That would be interesting to look that.

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 07-11-2009, 02:57 PM

eine kleine Probe.... I only secured these images from another site.

**stonemint** · 07-12-2009, 04:23 AM

No, but I did hear a rumor that a certain party is in negotiations to make sure this book does not end up in the hands of less scrupulous people....

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 07-12-2009, 04:40 AM

by stonemint

No, but I did hear a rumor that a certain party is in negotiations to make sure this book does not end up in the hands of less scrupulous people....

Dear Mr. Stonemint, in my experience of these things, the "less scrupulous" also are invested of insufficient intelligence to make sense of what I have seen of this book. I do read German, and this work is typical of an era in which an apprenticeship to become a master tailor or hat maker was nearly ten years. In fact, what I have been able to read of this work in the handful of pages posted by a German figure on the lord of the flies website, this work is entirely typical of tailoring books of the era which are mostly in prose and describe methods of tailoring known to those reading them, but which would remain a mystery to you and me...unless one of you had your apprenticeship in the 1920s or 1930s.
This work is from a publishing house that provided practical guides to the trades and crafts.

The other thing which eludes the modern day hat seeker is the following: Americans imagine that Germany of yore worked a certain way, that is, akin to the micro managerial and motions studies, Taylorite scientific management system that afflicts many of us. In German military usage it is called Befehlstaktik. It did not.

In reality, in the German military and elsewhere (in my 35 years of professional experience had by few Americans...) there was and remains a startling latitude in certain areas of professional activity, versus the pettifogging death from above sort of management and command and control that plagues us today. That is, there existed no single way to do many things, despite the Fuehrerprinzip of the presumed dictatorial ways of a Muetzenmachermeister, or what we think we know of him in our mind's eye.

The celebration of the crafts and the artistic aspect of same, that one brought the value to work of one's own creative potential was and is a foundation of what has been deutsche Wertarbeit.

This book from the few pages I can read on line embodies that same freedom of crafts, without being some kind of magic template to allow a faker to make a new cap and fool us all. An authentic cap in the hand of a skilled craftsman today is as toxic in this regard, if one is simply monstrous enough to disassemble the real piece into its constituent parts. Ergo all existing caps in the wrong hands are equally poisonous as might be this book.

We have done far more damage to ourselves with our digital pictures, I think, than what ever this book represents for the agonized 21st century.

**Friedrich-Berthold** · 07-12-2009, 04:49 AM

In the process of looking for other copies of this Hempe, Muetzenmacherei, I also have found an interesting history of hat making in Germany, about which I shall report to my readers in the near future.