Berlin Iron
Berlin iron is cast, black-burnished iron jewellery of Prussian manufacture - created in the context of the Wars of Liberation of 1813 and, over the following decades, become an emblem of patriotic mourning culture.
Written by Dr. Helene Vasall
Berlin iron is a distinctively German category of mourning and memorial jewellery. Unlike English jet or French French Jet, it arose not from a fashion but from a political context: the Prussian appeal of 1813 to exchange gold jewellery for iron pieces in order to finance the war. This political birth makes Berlin iron the most strongly symbolically charged material in European mourning jewellery.
The Wars of Liberation and the appeal of 1813
In the spring of 1813, after the outbreak of the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, Prussia was insolvent. Frederick William III and Queen Luise (posthumously) became the iconic frame of a donation campaign that entered history under the slogan Gold gab ich für Eisen ("I gave gold for iron"). Aristocratic women, middle-class women and some men handed in gold jewellery, rings, chains and wedding rings at the Prussian collection points. In return they received a cast iron piece - brooch, pendant, bangle or ring - with the inscription worked into it.
The gesture was therefore not classical mourning jewellery. It was a mourning patriotism: the iron piece mourned the lost gold jewellery and at the same time celebrated the renunciation. In the following years this developed into an independent category of jewellery, produced and worn even without the original occasion of donation.
Manufactories and technique
The most important production sites were the Königliche Eisengießerei Berlin (Royal Iron Foundry Berlin, founded 1804) and the Königliche Eisenhütte Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia (see The Berlin Iron Manufactories). Both worked with an extremely fine sand-casting process that took impressions of wax models in moulds of levigated quartz sand. The result: filigree rosettes, Gothic tracery, antique-style reliefs and richly profiled pendants - all cast, without reworking by graver.
After casting, the pieces were black-burnished: a surface treatment with linseed oil and heat that produced a deep black, slightly lustrous patina. This patina is sensitive to acids and moisture; well-preserved pieces are rare today.
Forms and motifs
The typical forms are brooches with a central medallion, pendants on fine iron chains, narrow bangles, drop earrings and mourning rings. Frequent motifs:
- Oak leaves as a Prussian symbol - the oak wreath was the most important pictorial element
- Anchor as a symbol of hope - Pauline, not maritime
- Mourning urn and weeping willow - the classical mourning iconography of Sensibility
- Antique-style heads in the manner of Roman cameos
- Gothic architectural details - tracery, pointed arches, finials - from the 1820s onwards with the early Gothic Revival
The pieces are rarely signed, but individual manufactories can be identified through casting marks and stylistic features. Gleiwitz pieces are on average finer than Berlin ones.
Social standing
Berlin iron was not jewellery for the poor. On the contrary - the original donation campaign appealed to the middle classes and the lower nobility, and the iron exchange piece signalled "I have donated gold". In the following decades Berlin iron remained a deliberately antiquarian, often demonstratively patriotic jewellery - worn above all in widow's mourning jewellery and half-mourning by the Prussian middle class.
With the revolution of 1848 the material largely disappeared; the now republican-minded middle class had lost its appetite for Prussian jewellery of renunciation. After 1871 there was a brief rediscovery in the wake of Wilhelmine patriotism - but these later pieces are technically coarser and lack the original inscription.
Berlin iron today
Original pieces are today traded above all at auction - well-preserved brooches with the Gold gab ich für Eisen inscription achieve four-figure sums. The largest public collections are held in the Prussian palaces (see The Berlin Iron Manufactories), in the Deutsches Historisches Museum and in the Märkisches Museum Berlin.
In modern memorial jewellery the material plays no role - the production technique (finest sand casting with wax models) is too laborious today, and the political context cannot be reactivated. Anyone who inherits a historical Berlin iron piece should keep it dry and on no account polish it - the patina cannot be replaced.
Questions about this entry
- What does the inscription 'Gold gab ich für Eisen' mean?
In the spring of 1813 the Prussian crown called upon women to surrender their gold jewellery in order to finance the war. In return they received iron jewellery bearing this inscription - a receipt that was at the same time a distinction. The motto ("I gave gold for iron") is the most important historical inscription in German mourning jewellery and is found on many surviving pieces.
- Why does Berlin iron look so delicate even though it is cast?
The manufactories used a sand-casting process with extremely fine-grained moulding sands and wax models, capable of reproducing even the smallest details. The pieces are accurate down to the millimetre - rosettes, anchors, Gothic tracery, antique-style reliefs. The technical standard was among the highest in the world.
- How does Berlin iron differ from later iron jewellery?
The peak period is sharply delimited: 1813 to about 1848. Pieces from this time show Neoclassical to early Biedermeier forms, often with political references (oak leaves, Gothic architecture). Later iron-jewellery imitations from the third quarter of the 19th century are technically coarser, heavier, and mostly without political charge.
Further reading
- Berliner Eisen - Schmuck aus der Zeit der Befreiungskriege - Anne-Kathrin Sors (2018)
- Eisenkunstguss in Berlin und Gleiwitz - Manuela Vergoossen (2013)
- Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten - Bestand Eisenschmuck
Related entries
- Core conceptsWidow's Jewellery
Widow's jewellery is the graduated mourning jewellery worn by widows in the 19th century according to a strictly codified plan of court mourning - from deep matte black to half-mourning lilac, each phase with its own materials and its own formal language.
- Core conceptsMourning Jewellery
Mourning jewellery is body adornment that signals a death, binds the memory of a deceased person, or does both at once - since the 17th century a jewellery type in its own right, with a material language of its own.
- MaterialsJet (Gagate)
Jet - German *Gagat* - is a fossil, deep-black material formed from petrified wood which in the nineteenth century became the very epitome of Victorian mourning jewellery.
- MaterialsVulcanite (Ebonite)
Vulcanite is hardened, black-dyed natural rubber - an industrial invention of the 1840s which found wide use in Victorian mourning jewellery as an inexpensive alternative to jet.
- PeriodsBiedermeier (1815–1848)
Biedermeier is the German-speaking mourning-jewellery epoch between the Congress of Vienna and the revolution of 1848 - a bourgeois, introverted period of forget-me-nots, Berlin iron and hairwork mosaic, with an understanding of mourning jewellery oriented more towards the family and the private sphere than towards the court.
- People & cultural historyThe Berlin Iron Manufactories
The Prussian royal iron foundries in Berlin, Gleiwitz and Sayn made fine jewellery of blackened cast iron between 1804 and around 1870 - at first as a patriotic exchange material during the Wars of Liberation (*Gold gab ich für Eisen*, "I gave gold for iron"), later as an established mourning and memorial line of the Biedermeier period.
- Jewellery formsMourning Brooch
The mourning brooch is the central women's jewellery form of Victorian mourning wear - a brooch, often the size of a palm, pinned to dress, collar or veil, and today an almost exclusively historical field of collecting.
- Jewellery formsMourning Locket
The mourning locket is a pendant worn on a neck chain with an interior compartment - a concealed carrier of hair, photograph or inscription that keeps the memento close to the body and has been, from the eighteenth century to the present, the most important private form of mourning jewellery.