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In Fassbinder's movie, the parallel between Maria and the Federal Republic is clearly defined: Maria kills a black American G.I.; her German husband takes the fall, and she remains loyal to him while he is in jail—a situation analogous to the prisonlike condition of East Germany before 1989. Her loyalty, however, does not preclude exchanging sexual favors for cigarettes, silk stockings, and ultimately, corporate perks. Lilli first appeared in 1952, when the so-called German economic miracle was under way, though far from fully realized. And while Lilli doesn't bear the metaphorical burden of a marriage to the East, it's hard not to view her pursuit of wealth as similar to that of West Germany. She is the vanquished Aryan, golddigging her way back to prosperity.

Ruth Handler first encountered the Lilli doll when she was shopping in Switzerland on a family vacation. "We were walking down the street in Lucerne and there was a doll—an adult doll with a woman's body—sitting on a rope swing," Ruth told me, though she has in other interviews placed this epiphany in Zurich and Vienna. Her daughter Barbara, in her mid-teens and well past the age for dolls, wanted Lilli as "a decorative item" for her room. Ruth bought three—two for Barbara, one for herself.

"I didn't then know who Lilli was or even that its name was Lilli," Ruth said. "I only saw an adult-shape body that I had been trying to describe for years, and our guys said couldn't be done."

"Our guys" were the male designers at Mattel. Since Barbara was a child, Ruth had tried to get them to develop a doll with a woman's body. She got the idea watching Barbara play with paper dolls who were "never the playmate or baby type," but rather "the teenage, high-school, college, or adult-career type."

"Through their play," Ruth said, Barbara and her friends "were imagining their lives as adults. They were using the dolls to reflect the adult world around them. They would sit and carry on conversations, making the dolls real people. I used to watch that over and over and think: If only we could take this play pattern and three-dimensionalize it, we would have something very special."

Special was not how the male designers saw it. It was costly. In America, they told Ruth, it would be impossible to make what she wanted —a woman doll with painted nails " Othing" that had "zippers and darts and hemlines"— for an affordable price.

"Frankly," Ruth recalled, "I thought they were all horrified by the thought they were of wanting to make a doll with breasts."

But just because the dolls couldn't be made in America didn't mean they couldn't be made. In July 1957, Jack Ryan took off for Tokyo to find a manufacturer for some electronic gadgets he had designed. "Just as I was leaving," he said, "Ruth stuck this doll into my attache* case and said: 'See if you can get this copied.' " The doll, of course, was Lilli.

Jack was accompanied on the trip by Frank Nakamura, a recent graduate of Los Angeles' Art Center School whom Mattel had hired as a product designer in April. A United States citizen, Nakamura was also fluent in Japanese; during the war, he taught the language in a school run by the U.S. Military Intelligence Service at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. When the war ended, he was sent to Japan to debrief Japanese soldiers on their battle experiences and report their stories to General MacArthur.

Frank "knew his way around Japan very well," Jack said. "And in Japan, it's more important to know your way around and to be able to make connections than it is here. Here you walk into any office and you're doing business right away on face value. It's not so in Japan."

The trip did not begin auspiciously. Ryan, Frank recalled, became edgy when the plane took off. He had an odd phobia for an aerospace engineer: He was afraid to fly. Nor did things go smoothly on the ground. Frank contacted numerous manufacturers, none of whom was equipped to make vinyl dolls. After three weeks, Ryan returned to California.