SBM Königsberg at auction: documented lots and value bands.

How to read this page.

Hammer, estimate and realised price.

Three figures circulate around any single auction lot, and confusing them is the first source of distortion in market discussion. The pre-sale estimate is the auction house's published range, normally given as a low and a high figure; it is set principally to attract bidders and is not a market value in any strict sense. The hammer price is the bid at which the lot was struck down to a buyer; it is the conventional market datum and the figure quoted in catalogue results. The realised price is the hammer plus the buyer's premium and is what the purchaser actually paid. German houses commonly charge a buyer's premium of 24% to 27% on the hammer, with VAT on the premium in certain sale categories. Where the source page distinguishes the three figures, this article preserves the distinction; where only one figure is publicly reported, the entry is labelled accordingly. Readers comparing lots across houses should be alert to the difference between hammer-quoted and realised-quoted figures; a hammer of €1,000 in a German Auktionshaus corresponds to a realised price of roughly €1,250 to €1,290 once premium and VAT are added.

Buyer's premium and currency.

All figures in this article are reported in euros, the currency in which the great majority of SBM auction material is sold. Where a result was originally quoted in Swiss francs (the Swiss Auction Company is the relevant case) the figure has been converted at the spot rate on the date of sale; the original-currency figure is preserved in the source notes. US-dollar conversions are not given inline because the relevant collectorate is concentrated in the euro area and the cross-rate fluctuation over the 2021–2025 window would distort comparison; collectors working in dollars or sterling should convert at the current spot rate. Note that buyer's premium varies materially across houses — Dorotheum and Quittenbaum sit at the higher end of the German-Austrian range, regional houses such as Mehlis and Wersching closer to 24%. The realised cost to a buyer in a German regional house and an Austrian metropolitan house can differ by several percentage points on the same hammer price.

Why pre-2020 data is omitted.

Results from before 2020 are excluded from the documented-lot table that follows. Two reasons combine. First, the SBM auction market underwent a quiet revaluation in the 2018 to 2020 period, partly as a function of the second-decade readership of the Erichson and Tomczyk monograph reaching collectors and cataloguers who had not previously had access to the institutional reference, and partly as a function of the generational change in the East Prussian Vertriebenen-descended consigning families, whose grandchildren began entering the market in the late 2010s. Second, the German-house auction-archive convention typically retains detailed lot pages for five to seven years before consolidating older lots into summary-only entries; comprehensive verification of lot detail before 2020 is therefore impeded by the source data itself. The 2021–2025 window gives a representative picture of the present bidding environment without the noise of the pre-revaluation period.

Documented SBM lots, 2021 to 2025.

What follows is the hand-curated set of publicly verifiable SBM Königsberg auction results across the 2021–2025 window. Each row corresponds to a lot whose existence is documented by a named auction-house catalogue page or by an indexed search snippet; where the lot page itself was retrievable, the full hammer or estimate figure is given. Where the lot was confirmed in an aggregator index (Invaluable, LiveAuctioneers) but the detail page sits behind a login wall, the lot is included with the explicit note that the hammer price could not be extracted. The table is grouped by object category to permit comparison within the category; readers interested in time-series rather than category comparison can use the date column to re-order mentally.

Caskets and hollowware.

The Wendl 2021 casket is the single most instructive entry in this category and the headline result of the 2021–2025 window. The lot was offered at a conservative €150 estimate consistent with the auction house's general practice on lesser-known craft material; it cleared the room at €1,000 hammer, a result of nearly seven times the low estimate. The pattern is not isolated. The bernsteinmobil network's private database records the same multiplier — roughly five to ten times over low estimate — recurring across most of the cased-amber lots tracked over the same period at German regional houses. The interpretation is that auction-house cataloguers in regional venues materially undervalue the international collector demand for SBM cased objects, particularly where the provenance plaque is legible and the casket retains its original silver mounts. A collector bidding on a Wendl-class casket should expect to compete with absentee bids well above the published estimate; a consignor offering a comparable piece should consider reserve-only consignment or, where the piece warrants it, direct private placement before consignment.

The Wersching clock entry is more representative of the entry market. A starting price of €140 on a small Art Déco amber-tiled clock of c. 1930 corresponds to a hammer typically in the €200–€350 range; the lot detail page had not concluded at the time of source retrieval and the final figure is not in this dataset. Wersching consistently positions SBM clocks and small decorative objects in the accessible price band, and the house is a productive venue for first-time collectors entering the SBM market. The Invaluable smoking-set entry from May 2023 illustrates the aggregator gate problem: the lot is confirmed to have existed and to have been catalogued under the SBM attribution, but the detail page requires an authenticated Invaluable session that this dataset did not access, and the hammer is therefore not in evidence. Aggregator-confirmed lots are included in this article for completeness, with the explicit note that the price column should be read as missing rather than as zero.

Designer-attributed pieces.

The Quittenbaum 2022 Brachert-attributed bowl is the single most important data point for the designer premium in the 2021–2025 window. The piece carried the SBM cypher and the canonical inscription on the silver, which establishes the institutional attribution beyond reasonable doubt; the cataloguer further noted stylistic affinities with Brachert's documented idiom but stopped short of personal attribution to Brachert as the named designer. The result of €3,500 at hammer is the appropriate market clearing price for a piece offered at this level of attribution caution: the SBM institutional attribution carries a clear premium, the Brachert stylistic affinity adds a further premium, and the bowl format with intact silverwork commands additional interest from collectors of inter-war hollowware. Setting the result against the Dorotheum 2024 standard SBM brooch at €240 (entered below) gives a ratio of approximately fifteen-to-one between a designer-affinity hollowware piece and an anonymous-attribution small jewellery piece. The ratio is not, however, a clean multiplier for any individual piece — it conflates the designer effect with the type-of-object effect and with the bowl-versus-brooch material-volume effect. The defensible reading is that a documented Brachert attribution adds roughly a three- to five-fold multiplier over comparable anonymous SBM material in the same category.

The published auction record for personally attributed Brachert amber pieces — as distinct from Brachert-affinity or Brachert-workshop pieces — is extremely thin in the 2021–2025 window. The Brachert museum at Otradnoye and the Kaliningrad Amber Museum hold the documented Brachert corpus, and pieces of secure personal attribution do not normally enter the open auction market. Where they do, they tend to be placed via private treaty by specialist German houses rather than offered in conventional catalogue sales, which puts them outside the dataset of this article. Collectors and researchers interested in the personal-attribution segment should monitor the Quittenbaum, Van Ham and Nagel catalogues directly and should consider contacting the bernsteinmobil network for advance notice of pieces that surface through specialist channels.

Silver-mounted jewellery.

The silver-mounted jewellery category is by some margin the largest single segment of the SBM auction market by lot volume and the most stable in pricing. The Dorotheum result of €240 realised on a 935-silver cherry-amber brooch is the cleanest comparator the dataset contains, because Dorotheum reports the realised price (hammer plus premium) rather than the hammer figure alone and because the lot detail is fully retrievable from the source URL. The Mehlis Sonderauktion Bernstein produced multiple SBM lots in the €100 to €200 band, with two specific lots whose hammer prices are cited in the snippet record at €100 and €140 respectively; the catalogue page itself returned a 404 on direct fetch despite appearing in indexed search results, which is a typical limitation of older German-house catalogue retention. The Invaluable-indexed pendant and Rosenbrosche entries confirm the category's continuing circulation across aggregator-indexed houses but do not contribute price data to the dataset.

The convergence of the German-regional and Austrian-metropolitan results gives a remarkably stable picture: small SBM-cyphered silver brooches and pendants of average grade and condition cluster in a €100 to €280 band across the 2021–2025 window, with very little dispersion. The lower end of the band tends to be associated with the 800-silver pieces (a lower-grade alloy that the SBM used for accessible jewellery lines) and the upper end with the 935- and 935-silver pieces (used for the better-quality output). Cherry-shaped, heart-shaped and small cabochon amber set in this kind of mount sits firmly in the middle of the band. Distinctive forms — the rose-form brooches such as the Invaluable Rosenbrosche, the figural pendants, larger statement clasps — command modest premiums above the standard band, normally in the €300 to €500 range, but rarely move into the designer-attributed register without independent attribution evidence.

Ephemera and reference material.

The ratisbon's sale of March 2025 records an emergent and important sub-market: period SBM ephemera and printed material. The "Siegespreise und Ehrengaben" catalogue is an SBM-published reference work documenting the manufactory's production of prize and honour gifts in the late 1930s and early 1940s — including the Olympic and Wehrmacht-related commissions that have given the period catalogue a particular research interest. A hammer of €275 with a 24.5% buyer's premium gives a realised price of roughly €342 to the purchaser. The result reflects a broader trend: SBM ephemera and period printed material — catalogues, presentation booklets, Siegespreis pamphlets, workshop photographs in original mounts — have become an active collecting category in their own right since approximately 2020, driven by museum acquisition interest and by researchers building reference libraries for personal-attribution work. The category is still emergent and prices remain volatile; a comparable catalogue at a different house in the same year might clear at €150 or at €500 depending on the bidder pool. Collectors and institutional buyers building reference collections should monitor ratisbon's, Hauck & Aufhäuser, and the relevant book and ephemera departments of Quittenbaum and Van Ham.

Aggregator-confirmed lots with gated detail.

Several lots whose existence is confirmed by Invaluable and LiveAuctioneers search snippets could not be entered into the priced columns because the lot detail pages returned HTTP 403 to direct retrieval and require an authenticated aggregator account to access. The lots are listed for completeness so that researchers can pursue them via authenticated channels:

• Invaluable lot 335 — "Anhänger mit Bernstein, SBM-Königsberg" (amber pendant).
• Invaluable lot 1216 — "SBM Königsberg Art Deco amber-tiled smoking set" (2023-05-17).
• Invaluable lot 2319 — "SBM Königsberg Rosenbrosche" (rose-form amber brooch).
• Invaluable lot 738 — "Necklace with amber, FISCHLAND, Georg Kramer", silver and Baltic amber, 1930s.
• Invaluable lot 720 — FISCHLAND amber ring, silver, Walter Kramer / Fischland GmbH, Ribnitz.

Researchers with an Invaluable subscription and an interest in completing the dataset are welcome to share retrieved hammer prices with the bernsteinmobil network for inclusion in subsequent revisions of this article.

Collector value bands for baltic amber.

The following per-gram bands summarise the present collector market for the most common SBM and adjacent baltic categories. They are observational rather than appraisal figures — they describe what comparable pieces are clearing at in public auction and in documented private sale, and they should not be read as a guarantee of price for any individual piece. Individual results depend materially on length, condition, clasp legibility, completeness of provenance documentation and the immediate bidder pool of any given sale. The bands are quoted in euros per gram; British sterling and US dollar equivalents move with the spot rate and are not given inline.

SBM olive necklace, standard.

The classic SBM olive necklace — strung olives of cognac or honey-cognac amber, original SBM-cyphered silver clasp, average length of 50 to 70 cm — clears the present collector market at approximately €5 to €10 per gram. A 30-gram necklace in this category therefore corresponds to a value band of €150 to €300; a 60-gram example to €300 to €600. The lower end of the band attaches to necklaces with clasps that are present but with the cypher partly worn, to pieces with mixed-grade amber, and to necklaces whose stringing has been replaced post-war (a common conservation intervention that does not affect attribution but does affect collector premium). The upper end attaches to pieces with crisp clasp cyphers, consistent grading across the olive run, and unrestrung original cord where it survives.

SBM olive necklace, honey and butter grades.

Honey-grade olives — the warm golden colour without significant cognac darkening — and butter-grade olives — the opaque, creamy yellow that the manufactory consistently grouped as a premium category — sit at €10 to €18 per gram. The premium over standard cognac reflects both the underlying material rarity (honey and butter grades are scarcer in the Samland deposit than cognac and standard mixed grades) and the consistent collector preference for these colour bands within the inter-war collector market. A 40-gram honey necklace therefore corresponds to a value band of €400 to €720, with the upper part of the band reached only by exceptional examples in original condition with documented provenance.

SBM olive necklace, marbled white (top grade).

The marbled-white grade — opaque white with the characteristic clouded internal structure that the manufactory's master sorters reserved for its top-end production — sits at €15 to €30 per gram, the highest-grade band in the standard SBM jewellery output. A 30-gram marbled-white necklace with original SBM clasp and verifiable provenance reaches €450 to €900; an exceptional 60-gram example with documented archival history can exceed €1,800. Pieces in this category are uncommon in the open auction market — they tend to circulate via private treaty between specialist collectors — and the published auction record for the category is correspondingly thin in the 2021–2025 window. The €15–30 per gram band rests primarily on documented private-treaty transactions in the bernsteinmobil network's database; the public auction sample is too small to anchor the band independently.

Cabochon brooches and pendants.

Cabochon-set SBM brooches and pendants in 800 or 935 silver, with original cypher, cluster in a stable €100 to €280 band — the band that the Dorotheum 2024 and Mehlis dataset entries support directly. Larger statement pieces and figural mounts (cherry, heart, rose, leaf forms) reach €300 to €500. Pieces with inclusion-bearing amber, even at small scale, command material premium and move into the per-gram band of the inclusion category below. The per-gram framing is less informative for this category than for the necklace categories, because the silverwork carries a substantial portion of the value independent of the amber weight; collectors should look at piece-level comparables rather than at per-gram bands when valuing brooches.

Designer-attributed Brachert, Holschuh, Koy.

Documented personal attributions to Brachert, Holschuh or Koy do not lend themselves to a per-gram band — the designer effect dominates the material valuation, and individual pieces clear at prices that reflect the strength of the attribution evidence, the type of object and the bidder pool of any specific sale. The Quittenbaum 2022 Brachert-affinity bowl at €3,500 is the most useful published anchor for the category. Documented Holschuh pieces in amber are scarce in the public auction record; documented Koy pieces are scarcer still, with most of her output held privately or in specialist museum collections. Collectors and consignors with material in this category should treat published auction comparables as starting points only and should consider direct expert consultation before consignment or purchase.

Inclusion pieces with identifiable insect.

Inclusion-bearing amber — pieces containing visible insect or plant inclusions — sits in a wide €10 to €80 per gram band. The width of the band reflects the wide variation in inclusion quality: a partial or unidentifiable insect inclusion attracts modest premium over plain amber, while an identifiable insect with diagnostic morphology (full-bodied Diptera with intact wings and antennae, Hymenoptera with visible mandibles, the rarer Hemiptera and Coleoptera) commands substantial premium. The category interacts with the SBM provenance question: inclusion pieces specifically mounted by the SBM in silver are uncommon (the manufactory's principal market was decorative jewellery rather than entomological reference material) and where they appear they carry the SBM premium on top of the inclusion premium. Pieces in this category are routinely valued by direct examination rather than by per-gram band; the band is given here as a sanity check on first-pass valuation rather than as a guide to final placement.

Adjacent baltic categories.

Fischland-Kramer pre-1945 (material 5–25 €/g plus designer markup).

The Fischland-Kramer tradition — the inter-war silver-and-amber jewellery produced by Georg and Walter Kramer's workshop in Ribnitz, on the Fischland peninsula on the Baltic coast of Mecklenburg — is the principal adjacent category to the SBM output in the inter-war German amber market. Documented pre-1945 originals of the Fischland-Kramer line sit at €5 to €25 per gram on the underlying material, with a designer markup on top that depends on the formal complexity and on the legibility of the Kramer workshop marks. The Invaluable-indexed lots 738 (silver-and-amber Fischland-Kramer necklace) and 720 (Fischland amber ring, Walter Kramer / Fischland GmbH Ribnitz) confirm the continued circulation of the category at aggregator-indexed houses, although the hammer prices for these specific lots were not extractable from the gated detail pages.

Two distinctions matter for valuation. First, the date distinction. Pre-1945 originals by the Kramer workshop carry the historical and material premium that the post-war Ribnitz production does not; post-war pieces are valued as contemporary craft jewellery without the documentary-historical premium and sit materially below the band given above. Second, the documentation distinction. Pre-1945 originals with documented workshop marks and ideally with period photographs or estate provenance command the upper end of the band; pre-1945 attributions resting on stylistic affinity alone command the lower end. A documented Walter Kramer pre-1939 silver-and-amber necklace of 40 grams therefore corresponds to a value band of roughly €200 to €1,000, depending on attribution strength.

Bückeburger Trachtkette (2–5 €/g standard; 5–10 €/g with documented provenance).

The Bückeburger Trachtkette — the heavy multi-strand Tracht necklace associated with the Schaumburg-Lippe region around Bückeburg, in the Weser uplands of Lower Saxony — represents the principal regional Tracht-amber category in the inter-war and post-war German market. Standard Bückeburger Trachtketten without documented provenance sit at €2 to €5 per gram, the lowest per-gram band in the documented baltic-collector market; pieces with documented family provenance to the pre-1945 period, ideally with period photographs of the original wearer or with formal Tracht-association attestation, sit at €5 to €10 per gram. A standard 80-gram Trachtkette therefore corresponds to €160 to €400 in the no-documentation case, €400 to €800 with documented provenance. The category is materially affected by condition: Trachtketten were working accessories of formal regional dress, were worn at successive family occasions, and frequently show the patterns of wear consistent with that history. Restored pieces sit closer to the lower end of the relevant band; pieces in original unworn condition reach the upper end.

What moves a price.

Material grade and colour.

Within the SBM output and the comparable baltic categories, the underlying amber grade is the principal first-order driver of value. The sorting hierarchy that the manufactory's master sorters used in the 1930s — clear honey at the top, opaque marbled white as the rarest variant, cognac and butter as the consistent middle, mixed and lower grades for accessible lines — remains the framework within which the present collector market values material. A piece in marbled-white reaches the top per-gram band of its category; the same piece in mixed-grade amber clears at the bottom band. The grade effect operates independently of the designer attribution and of the manufactory premium and is the most reliable first-pass valuation criterion for a piece whose other attributes are uncertain.

Designer attribution.

The designer effect — documented personal attribution to Brachert, Holschuh or Koy — adds a multiplier of roughly three- to five-fold over comparable anonymous SBM material in the same category, as anchored by the Quittenbaum 2022 bowl at €3,500 against the Dorotheum 2024 brooch at €240. The multiplier is not linear: a stronger attribution evidence base (workshop photograph, exhibition catalogue entry, archival corroboration) commands a higher multiplier than a stylistic-affinity attribution; a Brachert attribution commands a different premium from a Holschuh or Koy attribution because the published market for Brachert is the deepest of the three. Designer attribution is sufficiently consequential for valuation that purchasers paying a designer premium should expect to see the attribution evidence on which the premium rests; "in the manner of" and "circle of" descriptions warrant materially smaller premiums than personal attribution.

Mounting and hallmark legibility.

The silver mount and the legibility of the SBM cypher and silver fineness mark are second-order drivers of value with first-order practical importance. A piece whose cypher is crisp and fully legible commands the upper end of its category band; a piece whose cypher is worn or partly illegible commands the lower end, even where the institutional attribution is otherwise secure. The fineness mark distinction (800 versus 835 versus 935 silver) tracks the SBM's internal grading of jewellery lines and gives a useful supplementary signal: 935-silver pieces sit at the upper end of the band, 800-silver at the lower end. Conservation of the original mount and clasp is the practical issue most collectors face; pieces with replaced clasps lose substantial premium relative to original-clasp examples.

Condition and conservation history.

Condition issues affect SBM pieces in characteristic patterns. Necklace cord routinely requires conservation re-stringing within the lifetime of the piece, and conservation re-stringing in the post-war period is a near-universal feature of surviving necklaces; the intervention does not affect attribution but does affect collector premium where it is detectable. Silver tarnish on the mounts is conservation-reversible without loss of premium; silver wear on the cypher is not reversible and reduces premium materially. Amber surface degradation — the milky surface bloom that develops on incompletely conserved amber over decades — is partially reversible by skilled re-polishing but the reversal itself is a conservation event with implications for collector premium. Caskets and hollowware show condition problems concentrated on the wooden carcass beneath the amber inlay (woodworm, joint failure, hinge corrosion) and on the inlay-to-carcass adhesive layer (separation, fragment loss); these are reversible by specialist conservation but the cost of conservation needs to be set against the achievable price.

Provenance documentation.

The provenance documentation that accompanies a piece — period photographs of original wearers, family papers documenting acquisition before 1945, post-war Vertriebenen inventories, contemporary auction-house catalogue entries — is the third-order driver of value with first-order interaction with the designer-attribution effect. A documented Brachert piece is worth materially more than a Brachert-affinity piece because the documentation supports the personal attribution; a documented Bückeburger Trachtkette is worth materially more than an undocumented one because the documentation supports the date attribution. The general rule is that any verifiable documentation moves a piece up by half a band within its category; specifically attribution-relevant documentation moves it up by a full band or more.

Market trends, 2010 to 2026.

The Asian boom and its aftermath.

The macroscopic shape of the baltic amber market over the past fifteen years is dominated by the Chinese collector cycle of 2010 to 2018. The Chinese mainland market for baltic raw and worked amber expanded sharply through the early 2010s, peaked in approximately 2014 to 2016 in raw-material prices and in 2016 to 2018 in finished-piece prices, and consolidated downward over 2019 and 2020 as Chinese collector demand normalised and the spot-rate regulatory environment around amber import tightened. The SBM segment of the market was insulated from the worst of the cycle by its narrower collectorate — SBM collectors are concentrated in Germany, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, the US East Coast and the academic museum community, with relatively little overlap with the Chinese boom-market collectors — but the underlying raw-material price movement affected the SBM market indirectly through the cost basis of any new SBM-related production and through the general headline-pricing context in which SBM lots were catalogued.

Consolidation since 2020.

The 2020–2026 window has been a period of quiet consolidation in the SBM market. The Erichson and Tomczyk monograph reached its second-decade readership in this period and contributed materially to the cataloguer literacy that drives accurate institutional attribution at sale; aggregator platforms expanded their coverage of German regional catalogues, making SBM lots more visible to international researchers; the generational change in the Vertriebenen-descended consigning families brought a steady supply of high-quality estate material into the market. The result has been firmer pricing without dramatic upward movement: the documented bands set out above are notably stable across the 2021 to 2025 window, with caskets and designer-affinity pieces outperforming and standard silver-mounted jewellery clearing at roughly constant prices in nominal terms.

The emergent ephemera segment.

The single most notable structural change in the SBM market since 2020 has been the emergence of period printed material and ephemera as a distinct collecting category. The ratisbon's 2025 sale of the "Siegespreise und Ehrengaben" catalogue at €275 is the cleanest published anchor for this category, but it is part of a broader pattern that includes presentation booklets, workshop photographs, exhibition catalogues, period sales literature and the Erichson-and-Tomczyk-cited primary documents. Institutional buyers — German regional museums building their collections, academic libraries acquiring reference material, Bückeburg and Ribnitz museum programmes — have entered this segment alongside private collectors, and the result has been firm and rising prices for documentation that previously circulated almost as an afterthought to jewellery sales.

What is not in this dataset.

Private-treaty sales.

Private-treaty sales — pieces placed directly between collectors, between estates and museums, between consigning families and dealers without going through an open auction — are not included in this dataset because their prices are not in the public record. The bernsteinmobil network maintains a private database of further documented transactions, including private-treaty placements for designer-attributed pieces, top-grade SBM hollowware, and documented Fischland-Kramer pre-1945 originals. The private-treaty record is materially larger than the public auction record for the SBM market and includes the great majority of the high-end transactions of the past decade. Researchers requiring information on the private-treaty record beyond what is given in this article are welcome to write.

Insurance valuations.

Insurance replacement valuations are not market values in the sense used in this article. A replacement valuation is a figure at which a specialist dealer would source a comparable piece for a claimant within a reasonable time horizon, typically including a margin for the difficulty of immediate replacement and any specialist conservation that the replacement piece would require. Replacement valuations sit materially above the public auction hammer for the same piece, normally in a band of 130 to 200 percent of the auction hammer depending on the category. Readers requiring insurance documentation should arrange a specialist written valuation rather than relying on the auction-comparable bands given in this article; the bernsteinmobil network does not issue insurance valuations as a routine service.

Non-baltic ambers.

This dataset is restricted to baltic succinite — the geological category to which all SBM material, all Fischland-Kramer material and all Bückeburger Trachten material belongs. Dominican amber, Burmite (Burmese amber), Mexican amber and Sumatran amber are excluded because they belong to different geological categories, are valued in different collector markets, and would distort the comparison if included. The bernsteinmobil network does not work in the non-baltic categories and refers inquiries in those categories to the relevant specialists. Readers with non-baltic amber to evaluate should contact specialists in Dominican amber (concentrated in the Dominican Republic and the US East Coast) or Burmite (concentrated in the East Asian and European Burmite collector circuits) rather than treating the bands given in this article as applicable across categories.

The auction houses, by relevance.

Quittenbaum Kunstauktionen (Munich).

Quittenbaum is the premier German specialist in Jugendstil and Art Déco applied arts, and the house with the deepest catalogue scholarship for designer-attributed SBM material. Brachert and SBM designer pieces appear in the bi-annual Jugendstil-und-Art-Déco sales and are catalogued by researchers with access to the relevant German-language literature and museum holdings. The Quittenbaum buyer's premium sits at the higher end of the German range. The 2022 Brachert-affinity amber bowl (Lot 422, Auction 162C) at €3,500 hammer is the headline SBM result of the 2021–2025 window. Collectors targeting designer-attributed material should monitor Quittenbaum directly.

Auktionshaus Wendl (Rudolstadt).

Wendl is a Thuringian house with a frequent flow of SBM cased objects, caskets and household amber pieces. The house's estimates tend to be conservative and the international collector demand routinely overshoots them — the 2021 casket at €1,000 hammer on a €150 estimate is the canonical example. Wendl is a productive venue for collectors seeking SBM hollowware at predictable price points and for consignors with caskets of average quality.

Dorotheum (Vienna).

Dorotheum is the largest auction house in continental Europe by sale volume and the principal venue in the German-speaking world for inter-war jewellery, including SBM brooches and pendants. The bi-annual "Jugendstil und Kunstgewerbe des 20. Jahrhunderts" sales reliably include SBM material, and the Dorotheum cataloguing convention of publishing realised prices (rather than hammer only) makes it the cleanest source for category comparables. The September 2024 cherry-amber brooch at €240 realised is the cleanest small-jewellery anchor in the dataset.

Auktionshaus Mehlis (Plauen).

Mehlis runs dedicated "Sonderauktion Bernstein" catalogues that concentrate SBM lots in single sales, which makes the house particularly useful for comparative pricing within a single bidder pool. The Sonderauktion Bernstein catalogue 8216 produced multiple SBM silver-mounted jewellery lots in the €100 to €200 band. The house's catalogue retention is uneven and older detail pages return 404 on direct retrieval, but the live sales themselves are well-attended and produce reliable price data.

ratisbon's (Regensburg).

ratisbon's is the specialist house for German contemporary-history material — the primary venue for SBM presentation pieces, Ehrengaben tied to the 1936 Olympics and Wehrmacht-related awards, and the emergent ephemera category. The March 2025 sale of the "Siegespreise und Ehrengaben" catalogue at €275 anchors the ephemera segment. Collectors and institutional buyers building reference collections should treat ratisbon's as a primary venue for documentation alongside the relevant book and ephemera departments at Quittenbaum and Van Ham.

Auktionshaus Wersching.

Wersching provides a steady flow of small SBM clocks and decorative objects at accessible price points and serves as a productive entry market for collectors new to the SBM category. Starting prices of €140 to €180 on small clocks are typical; final hammers sit in the €200 to €350 range. The house is appropriate for first acquisitions and for collectors building a representative SBM survey at modest budgets.

Küstenhammer (Rostock and the Ribnitz region).

Küstenhammer is a regional house local to the Fischland coast and the Ribnitz amber tradition. The house's regional location produces cross-pollinated estate consignments where SBM and Kramer-Fischland material appear in the same sales, which makes it useful for category comparison within a single bidder pool. SBM Schmuckschalen and decorative pieces appear regularly; the Sommer-Auktion catalogues are the most reliable.

Lempertz (Cologne) and Van Ham (Cologne).

The two principal Cologne houses — Lempertz, founded in 1845 and the oldest continuously operating German art auctioneer, and Van Ham, the most active contemporary Cologne house — handle high-end SBM material on occasion in their European Arts and Crafts sales but show no recurring SBM lots in their publicly indexed archives for the 2024–2025 window. Both houses warrant direct catalogue monitoring by serious collectors; the occasional high-end SBM lot that surfaces in their sales tends to clear at materially above the regional-house price band.

Invaluable and LiveAuctioneers (aggregators).

The aggregator platforms index German, Austrian and Swiss regional houses and are useful for archive search and for spotting lots that the consigning house has not heavily promoted in its own catalogue. The lot detail pages on both platforms sit behind login walls, and hammer prices are not extractable from public search. Researchers requiring aggregator-confirmed data should arrange authenticated access; the public-record dataset of this article is limited to retrievable lot detail pages.

International houses (Sotheby's, Christie's, Bonhams).

The international flagship houses show no recurring SBM-Königsberg lots in their publicly searchable archives for the 2021–2025 window. SBM material that reaches these houses tends to be catalogued under generic "Continental amber" or "European Art Deco jewellery" categories without manufactory-specific attribution, which makes archive search difficult and biases the publicly visible market towards the German specialist houses. The bernsteinmobil network's working assumption is that the international flagship houses occasionally handle SBM material on a private-treaty basis for specific collectors but do not catalogue it as a recurring open-sale category.

Candour about the data gaps.

The public auction record for SBM Königsberg material is, by any honest measure, sparse. The dataset above documents fewer than a dozen lots whose price information is fully retrievable from public sources across a five-year window; the bernsteinmobil network maintains a private database of further documented transactions, including private-treaty placements, aggregator-confirmed lots whose hammer prices were accessed via authenticated channels, estate inventories and family-archive material that have not entered the open market. The discrepancy between the public record and the actual market is material; the value bands given in this article rest as much on the private database as on the public anchors, and the public anchors are presented as instructive cases rather than as a representative sample.

Specific gaps in the published record include the following. Invaluable lot detail pages returned HTTP 403 on direct retrieval; hammer prices for several confirmed lots (335, 738, 720, 1216, 2319) are therefore not in this article. No publicly verifiable Sotheby's, Christie's or Bonhams SBM-Königsberg lots surfaced in this research pass. Hermann Brachert's publicly indexed auction archive on Invaluable, Mutualart and Askart contains only a handful of lots — too small a sample for category statistics — and is concentrated on hollowware and sculptural pieces rather than on jewellery. Toni Koy's auction footprint could not be verified from public sources; her published Wikidata entry exists but no auction lots for her signed work appeared in the searches conducted for this article. Bückeburger Trachtkette and documented pre-1945 Fischland-Kramer originals are represented in the article by value bands derived from the bernsteinmobil network's private records rather than by directly cited public hammer prices, because the public sample in the 2021–2025 window was too thin to anchor the bands publicly.

Readers and researchers with additional documented price data for the categories treated in this article are welcome to contribute. Subsequent revisions of the article will incorporate verifiable contributions with attribution to the contributing collector, dealer or institution.

Bibliography of cited auction houses.

• Auktionshaus Wendl, Rudolstadt — Lot 1652, Autumn Auction, 28 October 2021. Amber casket, SBM Königsberg, 1930s.
• Quittenbaum Kunstauktionen, Munich — Lot 422, Auction 162C, 11 May 2022. Amber bowl attributed to Hermann Brachert, SBM Königsberg, 1930s.
• Dorotheum, Vienna — Jugendstil und Kunstgewerbe des 20. Jahrhunderts, 12 September 2024. SBM Königsberg 935-silver brooch with cherry-shaped amber.
• ratisbon's, Regensburg — Lot 79-1024, 63rd Contemporary History Auction, 15 March 2025. Catalogue "Siegespreise und Ehrengaben aus Bernstein" by SBM Königsberg.
• Auktionshaus Wersching — Lot 503, Sommer-Auktion 218, 2024. Art Déco amber clock, SBM Königsberg, c. 1930.
• Auktionshaus Mehlis, Plauen — Sonderauktion Bernstein (catalogue 8216). Multiple SBM Königsberg silver-mounted amber jewellery lots, c. 1930.
• Invaluable aggregator — Lots 335, 738, 720, 1216, 2319 (SBM Königsberg and Fischland-Kramer). Detail pages gated; aggregator search confirms lot existence.

Companion references in the bernsteinmobil network.

• /en/sbm — Comprehensive English reference on the State Amber Manufactory.
• /en/sbm-designers — Designer-attribution context (Brachert, Holschuh, Koy).
• /en/sbm-authentication — The full identification procedure for SBM pieces.
• /en/baltic-amber-appraisals — The bernsteinmobil advisory service.
• /bernstein-preise — German-language treatment of present-day baltic amber prices.