Pickelhaube

Leather, Metal Reinforcements, and a Spike

The pickelhaube is recognised by a single feature, named in its own title: a spike. Pickel means point, and Haube is a general word for headgear, literally bonnet, so the name simply calls it the pointed headgear. The famous spike is said to have been a feature to protect the infantrymen against sabre-blows by cavalry, a purpose that belongs to the warfare of the 19th century, when mounted cavalry and edged weapons were still part of the threat a soldier's helmet was designed against. A point rising from the crown changes what happens when a blade comes down on the helmet, turning the top of the head from a flat target into an angled, defended point. Whether judged as protection or as appearance, the spike made the helmet unmistakable at a distance and gave German military forces a silhouette shared by no other army of the period in quite the same way.

The basic construction underneath the spike was leather with metal reinforcements and the metal point. Leather formed into a helmet body could be shaped and finished as formal military headgear, while metal strengthened the parts that needed it and supplied the defining spike. All-metal versions of the pickelhaube were also worn, mainly by cuirassiers, and they often appear in portraits of high-ranking military and political figures, such as Otto von Bismarck. The distinction matters when identifying examples: the standard infantry form is the leather helmet with metal fittings, while the all-metal form belongs chiefly to cuirassiers and to the formal portrait image of senior figures. Several other nations adopted the pickelhaube, or at least something very similar, so the spiked form spread beyond Germany even while it remained most closely associated with German forces.

From Prussian Design to Trench Obsolescence

The helmet's adoption was gradual. Originally designed in 1842 by King Frederick William IV of Prussia, its use slowly spread to other German principalities, and in 1887 the Kingdom of Bavaria was the last German state to adopt the pickelhaube. That long spread, forty-five years from Prussian design to the last German adoption, shows a helmet becoming a common German form state by state rather than by a single uniform decision. By the time Bavaria adopted it, the pickelhaube had become the established spiked helmet of German military forces, worn through the later 19th century as both protective headgear in its original sense and a central part of the military appearance of the period.

World War I exposed the limit of a leather helmet. In the trenches, it was found that the pickelhaube offered little protection to troops, because the conditions of that war demanded a helmet that could protect against the dangers of trench warfare, and leather with metal reinforcements was not built to that standard. In 1916 it was slowly replaced by the Stahlhelm, or steel helmet, that would still be worn by German troops in World War II, and the pickelhaube was reduced to ceremonial wear. With the collapse of the German Empire in 1918, the pickelhaube was completely abandoned as military equipment. Its afterlife, however, has been unusually long: even today it continues to be an important part of a cliched mental picture of Germans, especially in Britain. The helmet therefore survives in popular imagination long after it left service, its spike standing for an earlier era of German soldiering in a way the steel helmet that replaced it, for all its longer battlefield use, does not quite displace.