I was thinking, grownups have all sorts of specialized shows on the radio, shows of great interest to them, although, or even because, they understand at least as much about the subject as the speaker. Why shouldn’t we make such special shows for children as well? For example about toys, although, or even because, kids understand at least as much about toys as the man who’s speaking to you here. So, one day at around noon, when the department stores are as empty as they ever are, I took a leisurely stroll from table to table, as I was never allowed to when I was a boy. I studied everything very closely: the new toys, how the old ones had changed since I was little, and which ones had disappeared altogether. And now I’d like to begin with these, the ones that have vanished. Today we’ll only have time to get started; if you enjoy the tour, next week you can hear about its continuation.
I looked everywhere for an old party game called “The Lucky Fisherman.” It seems that this no longer exists. I got it for my birthday once. It’s so wonderful that I want to tell you about it now. Opening the box, the first thing you see are four cardboard walls glued together. You take them out and set them on a table. The walls are covered with shiny printed paper showing aquatic plants, fish, mussels, and seaweed: everything that swims around in the sea or lies on the ocean floor. In another compartment there are around twenty or thirty different fish, each of which has a ring in its nose. Why a ring? Something that’s usually the privilege of camels? Here’s why. The ring is made of iron. And the fishing rods are five or six elegant little sticks, each with a thin red string that, instead of an earthworm, has a pretty little magnet hanging from it. Whoever catches the most fish wins the game. But there are of course rules and the fish in this water are all numbered differently, and when the fishing is over, there’s no eating up the catch; there’s arithmetic instead. This is one example of what has disappeared. It seems, however, that something much more beautiful has vanished: a special type of music box. Perhaps many of you haven’t even seen one: a box that has music inside, a crank on the side, and some kind of landscape or cityscape atop, which, when you turn the crank, starts to move to the music. I got to see all sorts of music boxes on this tour, for example, cows being milked, a dog jumping up in the air, a shepherd stepping out of his hut and walking back in. They’re wonderful but not nearly as strange and enthralling as the particular music box I have in mind. I never owned it; I only saw it one day in a shop when I was little. If you wound it, exquisite battle songs would sound from the box, heavy cardboard gates would open onto a dark fortress that you could not see into from above, and a company of soldiers would march out. To the sound of drums they would make a loop through the green grass and then reenter the fortress from behind through a gate, which had since opened, and then wait inside for a short while, in the dark, all the time accompanied by music. The devil only knows how they fared in there before they neatly filed out again.
I’ve looked for something like it ever since. I can’t even find the little books that we used to get at the school bookstore that would sweeten the purchase of arithmetic books — a purchase that was possibly even more despicable than each individual math lesson, because the notebook contained in its empty squares all the lessons added up into one single sum of horrors — flip books, or whatever they were called, sequences of tiny photos showing a wrestling bout or soccer match in all its phases. You had to navigate quickly with your thumb so the images would shoot by, each close on the heels of the next. With such a book cupped in your hand you could easily transform a math lesson into a cinema show. But at least the elaborate toy with the delightful name “Wheel of Life” still exists. It relies on exactly the same trick, only the images aren’t bound in a book, but instead are mounted on a disk with the surfaces of the images facing inward. Around the disk is a wall with slits in it. And when you spin the disk quickly — while the wall remains stationary — through the slits you see people as if they were moving and alive, which is why the whole thing is called a wheel of life. I saw this in the “toy” department.
Before I tell you more about it, however, I’d like first to describe the toy gallery in full. By chance I began with the kingdom of dolls, but I’ll tell you about that next time. Up next: the animal aisle, which would put any magician to shame. It’s hard to describe the sorts of animals I came across there. Blue and pink dogs, horses so yellow that from afar they looked like shapes made of orange peel, apes and rabbits so artificially colored as to resemble the tulips the flower ladies sell at Potsdamer Platz. Not to mention Felix the Cat, who was available in large quantities, and the tiny Bibabo puppets, which you can slip over your fingers as the nice sales lady did before putting on the most indescribable little theater piece. She only stopped once she realized that under no circumstances would I buy what was on offer, which is how I felt in the animal gallery as well. But later on I just couldn’t resist and I bought something. It’s a very strange game, rather new, I think, but in any case I had never heard of it. It was nothing more than a small box with fifteen or so different rubber stamps. Each stamp had a piece of a landscape on it: houses, figurines, dirigibles, cars, boats, bridges, etc. It also came with an ink pad. With just a large sheet of paper you could spend hours stamping together various landscapes, neighborhoods, events, and stories. But that was already in the “party games” department, which came just after the animals. I nearly forgot to say how many Easter bunnies there are now in the animal gallery. Department stores have now become strategic locations; they would be the first to be occupied by the Easter bunnies if they ever planned an attack.
Cover your ears for a moment. What I have to say now is not for children to hear. Next time I will tell you the conclusion of my tour. I’m worried sick I’ll soon be swamped with mail, letters along the lines of: “What? Are you completely mad? You think that kids don’t already whine from morning to night? And now you’re putting ideas in their heads and telling them about thousands of toys that, up until now, thank God, they knew nothing about, and now they want all of them, and probably things that don’t even exist anymore?” How should I answer them? I could just take the easy way out and beg you not to repeat a word of our story, don’t let on a thing, and then we can continue next week just like today. But that would be mean. So it’s left to me to calmly say what I really think: the more someone understands something and the more he knows of a particular kind of beauty — whether it’s flowers, books, clothing, or toys — the more he can rejoice in everything that he knows and sees, and the less he’s fixated on possessing it, buying it himself, or receiving it as a gift. Those of you who listened to the end, although you shouldn’t have, must now explain this to your parents.
“Berliner Spielzeugwanderung I,” GS, 7.1, 98–105. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.
Broadcast on Radio Berlin, March 15, 1930. Benjamin dated the typescript “Berlin Radio, 15 March, 1930,” and for this date the Funkstunde announced a “Youth Hour (Berlin), Speaker: Dr. Walter Benjamin” from 3:20–3:40 pm.
1 Amélie (Linz) Godin (1824–1904), author of Märchen von einer Mutter erdacht (1858), Neue Märchen von einer Mutter erdacht (1869), and other collections of fairy tales. Benjamin refers to Godin’s work as his and his wife Dora’s “favorite collection of fairy tales” in a letter to Scholem (letter dated January 13, 1920, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 155).