A Stocking, a Hook, and the People Behind Them: Reading Germany’s Knitting History

A trade takes root in Erlangen

Erlangen’s hosiery story begins with migration. The city museum connects the trade to French Protestant refugees who settled in the Neustadt from 1686. What began as a local occupation became one of the town’s important livelihoods during the eighteenth century. A first guild ordinance followed in 1698, an early sign that the work had grown enough to need rules and collective representation. This is a city history, not a claim that knitting began in Germany in 1686. [1]

The museum’s account gives the trade a material setting. A master might work alone or with an apprentice in a small workshop; merchants with capital helped move the finished goods into wider markets. The hands that made the stockings and the people who financed, bought and exported them occupied different positions in the same chain. The guild emblem preserved by the museum—a miniature stocking frame enclosed in a glass bottle—makes the occupation visible as a shared identity. The museum also notes that the labor could be arduous and harmful to health. Pride in a skilled trade and difficult working conditions can belong to the same history. [6]

A surviving cotton stocking dated to around 1860 offers a way into the finished object. It is evidence that hosiery was made and collected; by itself, it does not reveal the exact stitch sequence, the maker’s name or whether it was produced by hand or on a frame. Erlangen’s museum places the object within the longer local industry, while the Metropolitan Museum’s collection record provides a useful point of comparison for how museums describe historic stockings. We should resist filling gaps in a catalogue with a confident reconstruction the object record does not support. [1][4]

Silk stockings and the Esche family

Farther east, Limbach-Oberfrohna tells a different story. The Esche Museum describes Johann Esche as a pioneer who used knitting-chair technology, innovative around 1700, to produce valuable silk stockings. Hosiery work then spread into domestic production. The museum’s phrasing matters: it credits Esche with the targeted use of a technology, not with inventing every knitting frame or single-handedly creating the region’s textile industry. The Esche family later appears as merchants and entrepreneurs as well as manufacturers. [2]

“Knitting chair” can sound like a familiar hand-knitting aid, but in this context it refers to a mechanised frame. A stocking frame forms loops through a coordinated system of needles and machine parts; it is not simply a large pair of hand needles. The distinction matters when we interpret a museum display. A modern photograph of a frame can help readers understand its scale and arrangement, but it cannot tell us exactly how a particular eighteenth-century stocking was made unless its catalogue record says so. [2]

The Esche Museum follows the region into the industrial age. It links the glove-making boom around 1900 with the rapid growth of knitwear production using artificial silk after the First World War. Its machine room includes warp-knitting machines and specialised sewing equipment. These processes belong to textile history, but they are not interchangeable with hand knitting. In 1949 Heinrich Mauersberger developed MALIMO stitch-bonding technology in Limbach-Oberfrohna. Stitch-bonding joins layers with threads; it is not the same structure as a hand-knitted fabric made from successive loops. A museum’s machine collection can therefore teach us not only what a technology does, but also where its boundaries lie. [2][5]

The hook becomes an industry

In Altena, Peter Heinrich Selter entered a local wire-making economy before founding his own company. The company’s history says he established a steel crochet-hook workshop in 1829, making hooks from cut lengths of wire. Selter’s current online company history says the business made around 600 types of crochet hook by 1860; a 2023 company press dossier gives a different figure—260. Both are company retrospectives, and the material reviewed here does not include an independent contemporary catalogue that resolves the difference. Rather than treating either total as settled, it is more accurate to record the discrepancy. Both accounts still point to a wide and varied range of manufactured hooks by the mid-nineteenth century, carried through nearby Iserlohn and onward to exporters. [3][12]

Look closely at a crochet hook and the industrial story becomes tactile. The shape of the head, the thickness of the shaft, the length and the finish affect how a yarn slides and how evenly a crocheter can form loops. A hook and a pair of knitting needles may share a place in a craft basket, but they do different jobs. The Selter story belongs specifically to crochet hooks at its beginning; it should not be retroactively described as a knitting-needle factory from day one. The company’s later range grew to include both crochet and knitting tools. [3]

The women who kept Selter going

The company chronology is also a family and labor history. After Eugen Selter died in 1915, his wife Josefine cared for their young son and helped keep the business operating with support from a company representative. After the Second World War, their son Gustav Adolf and his wife Hella led the firm together. The company credits Hella with the idea for the addi brand and the first catalogue in the 1950s. The name came from her husband’s nickname, “Addi,” but the company’s own account identifies Hella as the person who shaped the brand and its catalogue. Naming that work changes the story from a simple line of male founders to a fuller account of who sustained and presented the business. [3]

In 1952 the brand was registered, and in 1971 Thomas Selter took over company management. The company history says circular needles were then a smaller part of the range and that later development helped make them a flagship product. These are useful details about one manufacturer’s path, not a neutral ranking of every needle maker. A corporate timeline naturally highlights its own products and achievements. Set beside museum records of stocking frames and machine production, it helps reveal how a craft tool can move from workshop manufacture to a widely recognised brand. [3]

How to read the surviving objects

Five objects and images in this story invite five different questions. The Erlangen stocking frame shows the physical arrangement of a machine in a museum today. The Munich frame offers a second example from another collection. A modern hook photograph helps us compare tool shapes, not identify a historical product. The 1907 Chemnitz machine records one specialised way of knitting glove fingers. A 1900 printed illustration gives a contemporary view of the city’s industrial landscape. None of these images is a substitute for the 1860 stocking, the Selter company’s account books or a named worker’s testimony. [1][2][3]

That separation is useful when reading a surviving stocking or a pattern. A hand-knitted tube, a stocking made on a circular frame and flat pieces joined by seams can look similar when folded. Their heel construction, stretch and production rhythm are different. Museum descriptions often establish a date, material or provenance without documenting every stitch. It is more honest—and more useful to makers—to say what the record can establish and leave the rest open for further research. [1][2]

Germany’s knitting history is not one pattern carried unchanged across centuries. It is a set of regional histories in which migration, household production, machine engineering, tool making, trade and women’s management intersect. When you pick up a stocking, a crochet hook or a pair of needles, ask two questions alongside the familiar one about technique: who made the object possible, and whose name did the records preserve?

A short timeline

• 1686: French Protestant refugees settle in Erlangen’s Neustadt; the city museum connects this migration with the local hosiery trade. [1]
• 1698: The first Erlangen hosiery guild ordinance is recorded. [1]
• Around 1700: Johann Esche uses knitting-chair technology for silk-stocking production in Limbach-Oberfrohna. [2]
• 1829: Peter Heinrich Selter establishes a steel crochet-hook workshop in Altena. [3]
• 1949: Heinrich Mauersberger develops MALIMO stitch-bonding technology in Limbach-Oberfrohna. [2]
• 1952: The addi brand is registered; the Selter company credits Hella Selter with the idea and its first catalogue. [3]