Miracle shell
A wonder shell or wonder flower is a cockle shell that contains a paper flower or dried coral . If you put the mussel, which is sealed with a paper sleeve, into a glass with water, the contents swell. This opens the mussel shells and the paper flower or coral "grows" out of the mussel.
Miracle clams, from which a paper blossom connected to the shell by a thread grows up, were a popular travel souvenir for children in the 20th century, probably made in Asia. The paper bloom only lasted a few days. It was only later that miracle clams with real sea corals came onto the market, which can be kept for several months and are used as decoration.
Apparently the term “miracle flower” was also common for this object. Ursula Bruns describes in her novel 13 old donkeys , which is set in the 1950s, that not only plant shapes emerged from the mussel shells:
- [...] until the adults got up and looked over the children's heads at the glass as if they had never seen a miracle flower rise. The little gray object was a shell that opened in the water and from which a delicate plant blossomed with delicious slowness and glittering branches until it completely filled the glass.
- Colored snow swirled up from the nearest shell; from the third a wafer-thin paper house unfolded, from the fourth fish swam.
Without mentioning the mussel shell, but instead with reference to the likely Asian origin, Irmgard Keun has the main character tell in The Girl With whom the Children were not allowed to associate with about 1918:
- [...] we are all to ourselves and put the Chinese miracle flowers in a bowl of water. First they are very small and crunchy, and then they get bigger and bigger and very colorful and blooming [...] .
It cannot be ruled out that only folded paper flowers are meant here, which unfold on the water like a rose from Jericho , but the description of the growth of the flowers suggests that these are also the miracle flowers described above acts.
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.ameisenkeks.de/Wundermuschel
- ↑ Ursula Bruhns, 13 old donkeys , Munich undated (Goldmann), ISBN 3442033705 , p. 167
- ↑ Irmgard Keun, The girl with whom the children were not allowed to socialize, Munich ³1992, ISBN 3423110341 , p. 14