Culture : Germany Waging ‘Gnome Wars’ to Defend Craftsmanship and Quality : Imported Polish copies of the little statues wound national pride and pocketbooks.

At 2 a.m., a ringing telephone wrenches Munich lawyer Volker Spitz out of a deep sleep. It’s a German border guard calling from the Polish frontier, alerting him to a cache discovered during a routine truck inspection.

The guard has matched the suspects to full-body photographs. But he has a doubt: “Instead of a brown dog at the feet, there’s a white dog with black spots.”

“That’s the only difference?” Spitz demanded. “Then seize.”

The haul is tremendous. Hundreds of plaster gnomes are locked up and, barring any last-minute reprieve in court, slated for destruction. They are as good as finished, little red caps and all.

The gnomes are contraband: dread Polish imitations of the authentic German garden gnome. And German producers are fighting back, trying to stop the flow of pirate copies through lawyers such as Spitz, a specialist in intellectual property law.

To an American, a gnome may be nothing more than a word with a spelling impediment. A stretch when it comes to intellectual property. Ah, but gnomes are serious business in Germany, where most everything is serious, and this assault on Polish fakes is called the “gnome war.”

At stake is not only the gnome business and profits--hundreds of thousands of little men sold each year for up to $165 apiece--but the heart and soul of Germany: quality and German workmanship.

Good German gnomes are hand-painted, ceramic statues, ranging from six inches to three feet high, made to withstand the rigors of a German winter.

Sure, the Polish copies, made by low-wage Polish workers, can be had for a quarter of the price, producers say. But they are made of plaster, and they are spray-painted, for heaven’s sake. The colors run together and fade. The plaster freezes in winter, then crumbles in the spring sun like stale bundt cake.

“All those items are of poor quality,” German gnome producer Siegfried Liebermann said disdainfully of his Polish imitators. “The people who have bought them (plaster gnomes) and left them outside over winter are desperately unhappy the following year.”

Desperately.

There is another issue that Germans hesitate to raise, probably because it would sound too nationalistic, but which obviously is eating at them. Garden gnomes are German. They are little Germans carrying lanterns and hunting rifles and steins of beer, and they are the crowning glory of a clipped, manicured German garden. Poland is something else all together.

Just how the short, stocky men in beards and pointed caps made their way into the country’s collective consciousness is a bit of a mystery. Clearly they were already pervasive in the early 19th Century, when the Brothers Grimm included “Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs” in their book of popular fairy tales.

Gnomes, or zwerge, as they are called in German, routinely appeared in art and advertisements by the mid-19th Century, but not yet on the lawn.

That was the brainchild of two entrepreneurs from the state of Thuringia, August Heissner and Philipp Griebel, who, perhaps tired of ceramic deer and mushrooms, decided that gnomes belonged in the German garden. Separately, they each dived into garden gnome production in the 1870s.

Today, Bonn’s General Anzeiger newspaper reports, 35 million garden gnomes inhabit the Earth, and at least half of them reside in Germany. A good 50 of those in assorted sizes and shapes live in Friedrich Kemen’s front yard in the village of Swisttal-Odendorf near Bonn. Every week during good weather, Kemen carefully moves every one of the statues onto his center walkway so he can mow his lawn, then places them back in the grass again for all his neighbors to see.

Kemen often finds children and grandmothers admiring his collection but must contend with a dissenter in the neighborhood. “There is one guy who comes at night and tips them over,” Kemen said. “He’s got big feet. In the winter, I see his footprints.”

While garden gnomes are quintessentially German, not all Germans are enamored of them. The prestigious Allensbach polling institute discovered in June, 1988--the last date for which figures are available--that 39% of Germans truly liked gnomes, a dramatic drop from 1956, when 58% said they fancied them.

The 61-year-old Kemen believes that gnomes are cute, “round and down-to-earth.” But less enthusiastic Germans find them to be a symbol of narrow-mindedness, of the longing of Germans to stay within their own tidy gardens staring at a clean and cheerful face.

Nonsense, Kemen said, taking a moral stand. Germans who don’t like gnomes are the closed-minded ones. They’re the people who refuse to look at anything “small, low, crippled or simple.”

Many young Germans seem to have a gut reaction against gnomes--a deep-seated fear that gnomes, like station wagons and polyester plaids, will suddenly look appealing beyond a certain age.

The most adamant opponents assert that gnomes are simply in terrible taste. Cheap kitsch . And ugly. So offensively ugly, in fact, that more than one German has taken his neighbor to court over a garden gnome.

The most famous case occurred in Hamburg in the 1980s, when one condominium owner sued another who had put two six-inch gnomes in their common front yard. The statues lowered the property value, she argued. The case lasted four years until the judge ordered the gnomes removed in an 11-page ruling that stated the figures presented “a considerable, disturbing optical interference.”

That case prompted Guenter Griebel, great-grandson of Philipp Griebel, to get back into the gnome business--with a twist.

After World War II, Griebel’s father moved the family from Thuringia, which became part of East Germany, into the West, eventually settling in the village of Rot am See in Baden Wuerttemberg state. There he continued to make gnomes and other ceramic kitsch.

Griebel said it was not easy growing up as the son of a gnome manufacturer. “You didn’t tell people your father made gnomes. It was not good for getting dates,” he said.

When Griebel moved into the business in the rebellious 1960s, he tried to put a stop to the gnomes, shifting production to Christmas angels and other decorations. But 20 years later, a more mature Griebel found the judge’s decision to be an attack on fun and good humor, and he began his line of alternative gnomes.

The first, which he calls Neighbor’s Victim, was a hand-painted, ceramic gnome lying belly-down in the grass with a knife in his back. Then came his emancipated gnomes, including “Virgin Scare,” a naked gnome opening his trench coat to the world.

Griebel’s company, Das Zwergenkaufhaus, produces about 100,000 of his special gnomes per year. But the Polish copycats are eating into his business, and in the last year he has laid off three of his 30 employees. The Polish copies sell for about $13 each, compared to $46 for one of Griebel’s originals.

So Griebel and a handful of other producers have hired Spitz to represent them. Armed with copyrights, Spitz gets court orders to stop the import of pirate gnomes. Then he sends color photographs of the original gnomes to the border, where guards are told to check the merchandise for fakes.

German producers concede they are fighting a losing war with harried border guards who have better things to do, like checking for contraband slightly more ominous than rogue garden gnomes. The producers say they must put up a fight, nonetheless.

Many German producers do not have copyrights for their models, and gnomes are generic enough that all such statues made in Poland cannot be banned. But reproductions of German copyrighted designs can be stopped.

“It is necessary to protest this,” Griebel said.

The Heissner company is staying out of the fray. It believes that its superior quality alone will stymie the Polish competition. “Our customers are looking for a Heissner gnome,” said Markus Deppe, the marketing manager. “They appreciate a certain style that the Heissner gnome has. They’re classic.”

Said Griebel, 51, “It was never a question of art. A garden gnome was always kitsch, but a lovely form of kitsch .”

If this sounds like an oxymoron, it is not meant as one from a man who has 10,000 pieces of German kitsch on floor-to-ceiling shelves lining most rooms of his house: ash trays and coffee mugs, fruit knives and female figurines, sea shell boxes and holiday souvenirs galore.

“No human being can exist without kitsch ,” Griebel insisted. “If someone tells me they hate kitsch and live without it, I will tell him show me your closet or living room and I will find a dozen pieces.”