This teddy bear has been on my list of playthings for months, waiting for the right moment to come. Ever since I came across its story – which I am sure is similar to that of a significant number of families throughout history – it’s been in the back of my mind. It has made me think a great deal about innocence, and about how our attitudes toward it are messy bundles of contradictions. It also inevitably brought to mind Tomi Ungerer’s wonderful Otto - The Autobiography of a Teddy Bear.

But first, given that I have not included any teddy bears or indeed any toys by Steiff among the portraits yet, I will look at the figure of teddies, how they came about, and how they took over the world of soft toys. 

Many of us may have heard about the story of Teddy Roosevelt and his encounter with a bear around 1902 when on a hunting trip in Mississippi, in which he refused to shoot it on account of it being tied to a tree – this clearly being the height of unsportsmanlike behaviour for a hunter like himself. A political cartoonist working for the Washington Star called Clifford Berryman depicted Roosevelt’s refusal to shoot the bear in a cartoon. This in turn led to a Brooklyn candy shop owner called Morris Michtom, who also made stuffed animals with his wife, to design a little stuffed bear and dedicate it to the president, calling the toy Teddy’s Bear – you can take a look at it here. He received approval from Roosevelt to use his name, the business took off, and in 1907 went on to create The Ideal Toy Company.    

But the teddy bear has two simultaneous origin stories. Around the same date as this was happening in the United States, in Germany, Richard Steiff – nephew of Margarethe Steiff, who founded the Steiff company in the 1880s –, was also working on prototypes of stuffed bear toys, basing them on sketches of bears he would draw during his visits to the zoo. In 1902 he produced Steiff’s first stuffed bear, the 55 PB [see a replica here], which was introduced at Leipzig Toy Fair in 1903. At first it was met with little interest, until an American buyer called Hermann Berg saw it and was so captivated by it that he ordered 3000 on the spot. It took off, and in 1907 alone Steiff produced almost one million teddy bears.

This particular Steiff teddy was owned by Hans Butzke, a boy born in Vienna in 1929 to parents Netty, a nurse, and Julius, an accountant. After the German takeover of Austria in 1938, it became evident that the situation was getting progressively worse, so the family decided to flee. In 1940 the family was able to get on a train to Amsterdam, starting their journey to Panama, from where they would go to the United States. Netty told her son Hans, then 10 years old, to hold on to his teddy bear and never let anyone take it from him. She stressed the importance of this detail. When they got on the train, some Nazi soldiers took the teddy from him. In reaction, Hans screamed so loudly that the soldiers ended up throwing the teddy back at him, calling him names. They arrived in Amsterdam, the teddy bear safe in Hans’s arms, and eventually made their way to the US, finally settling in Brooklyn. Years later, Hans’s parents told him what Netty had chosen not to let on when he was ten – she had taken apart the stitching in the back of the teddy, and made a little pocket in the neck area, where she had hidden away valuables that helped them set up a new life. Sometime after the death of Hans (who changed his name to John in the US) in 2010, his son and granddaughter donated the teddy to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. You can watch a video here about the story and the family’s decision to donate it.

Several things stood out for me. The idea of a child’s toy used to smuggle things was interesting as a concept – I looked within the Holocaust Museum itself, and there were two other good examples of this phenomenon.

One is this toy monkey, used by an Austrian Jewish woman called Helena Fuchs to smuggle money out of Vienna. Her fiancé was already in London, they married there and then eventually would make their way to New York too.  

The second example is this very battered, threadbare teddy used to hide anti-Nazi political cartoons by a Polish man called Mr Jerzy Kajetanski [there are typos in this particular entry].

In both of those cases, however, there are no children involved.

I came across two Civil War era dolls in the US, named Nina [see here] and Lucy Ann [see here]. They are both said to have been used to smuggle medicines such as quinine and morphine, which were hidden in their hollow heads. In this case, it is said that they were used by children and continued to be used as dolls.

Toys seem to be an object of choice for smugglers, now and in the past – a simple search of recent drug smuggling in toys brings up a National Geographic video about a customs taskforce that uses dogs to detect the presence of drugs – one is seen easily sniffing out ecstasy that has been hidden in a toy car.

Reading about all of these brought to mind a memory I have had since I was a child, and which, I found out recently, I had distorted quite significantly over the years. My own memory was of me being around 7 and being given a teddy bear by my grandfather on a visit to the UK from Spain. The bear was very large, and a sort of golden, mustard yellow. Walking through customs on the way back, the customs official greeted me and asked to see the teddy, and proceeded to squeeze it vigorously, to my alarm. Afterwards, I asked my parents why he had done this, and they explained about smuggling. In my memory, I had made the customs official quite a friendly man who simply gave the bear an oddly enthusiastic squeeze.

However, having talked to my father about this recently, my ‘vivid memory’ had obviously been cobbled together by my mind based on fragments of conversations I had had about the incident over the years, and from memories of other visits that we made to the UK. In reality, the teddy bear incident took place when I was 3, and the customs official did not simply squeeze the teddy – instead, he poked several long pins into it, and then huffily referred to procedures and rules. I am told I was deeply upset, lip quivering, and struggling to hold in the tears while he was doing this. When he had finished with it, I declared I wanted nothing more to do with the teddy bear on account of it having been needled and poked mercilessly by this nasty man. None of us can remember what happened to the teddy bear — it may have ended up being left in the airport.

The idea was, of course, that there was a small chance my parents might have exploited my ‘innocence’ to smuggle drugs or other illegal goods. In this case, Netty put her faith in the fact that Hans was a child and therefore, with luck, would be perceived as being of no importance.

Hans was 10, by no means a small child, but his screaming still fell into a category that was not to be suspected. What would have happened if he had been 13? 14? 15? If the object had been a bag? A child screaming about a teddy was presumably too much trouble for the soldiers, who must have dismissed Hans as a pain and have seen him as being of no consequence. He was just a child with a teddy bear.

This awareness of the often automatic dismissal of children by adults was what enabled the Butzke family to survive and build a new life for themselves.

Hans continued to place his beloved bear on his bed every day, propped up against the pillows, even when he became a father, and then a grandfather. Looking at this teddy, I think we would be hard-pressed to find a more pleasant-looking lifelong companion.