CrottendorferWell documented
Crottendorfer Räucherkerzen — the incense cones that fuel Erzgebirge smoker figures across the region — started in a 10-square-meter kitchen in 1918, where Freya Graupner hand-made incense cones during the last, grinding year of the First World War. She registered the business formally in 1936, and it's still making cones in Crottendorf more than a century later, under a different owner today but the same family name over the door.
Note: this is a separate company from Graupner Holzminiaturen, though the two share a founder's family and, for a time, a building — Graupner Holzminiaturen occupies the incense company's former production site. Crottendorfer itself was nationalized in 1972 as VEB Räucherartikel, reprivatized in 1990, and sold outside the family in 2015 to its current owner, Mirko Paul.
The full story: a kitchen-table business, a state takeover, and a museum built from ash
Freya Graupner, born Löwe in 1888, started making incense cones by hand in a ten-square-meter kitchen in 1918 — wartime conditions, an improvised workspace, and a product that would come to define an entire regional industry. She didn't formally register the business until 1936. Her son Max took over production in 1955, moving it to an adjacent shed, and the firm survived two production fires during the DDR years, in 1963 and 1966.
The state took an increasing stake as the DDR consolidated small industry: partial nationalization came in 1959 as "Freya Graupner & Co. KG, Betrieb mit staatlicher Beteiligung," and full expropriation followed in 1972, when the business was renamed VEB Räucherartikel — state property, run for the state's benefit, no longer the family's to direct. Reprivatization was approved in March 1990 and private operations resumed that September, under Freya's granddaughter Maritta. The company opened a new production building in 1995 for its 60th anniversary, celebrated a 75-year jubilee in 2011, and in 2015 was sold to a non-family owner, Mirko Paul, who runs it today as Crottendorfer Räucherkerzen GmbH. A visitor attraction, "Räucherkerzenland," opened in 2017, turning the company's own century-long history into part of what it sells. We weren't able to confirm exactly how Freya Graupner and Ronald Graupner (founder of the separate, unrelated Graupner Holzminiaturen) are related — likely family, given the shared surname and shared property, but the documentary record doesn't spell it out.
Historical details above reflect publicly available sources as of 2026 and are presented in good faith; company-specific dates for small family workshops are sometimes thinly documented, and we've noted where regional context (rather than firm-specific record) is being described.