2 See “Schwester Tinchen,” in Godin, Märchenbuch, 3rdedition, mit 137 Holzschnitten und 6 Bildern in Farbendruck: nach Originalzeichnungen von Otto Försterling, Gustav Süs und Leopold Denus (Glogau: Carl Fleming, c. 1870–1880), 401–9. The image Benjamin discusses can be found on p. 402. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin attributes a version of the story to Friedrich Wilhelm Hackländer (Das Passagen-Werk [Z1, 2], GS, 5.2, 847 and 1055; The Arcades Project [Z1, 2], 693 and 881), but it has not been found in Hackländer’s Märchen (Stuttgart: Krabbe, 1843).
3 Benjamin refers to the front page of Berlin’s newspaper, the Vossische Zeitung, which featured two men holding spiked staffs standing on either side of the king.
4 See Goethe, Faust II, lines 11581–2 and Faust I, lines 1699–700.
CHAPTER 7. Berlin Toy Tour II
Many of you will probably want to know where this grand toy store is located, the galleries of dolls, animals, electric trains, and party games that I led you through last time and will continue to lead you through today. Nothing would be easier than to tell you where it is. But advertisements are not permitted on the radio, even subtle ones, so I cannot give you a name.1 What shall we do? Some children might like to confirm that what I said is true. And since it really is true, I would like nothing more than to do just that. Thus I must be cunning in revealing to you the following: as you have surely figured out by now, I was in a large department store.
Now have a look around, and be sure not to miss the huge metal model of the new Lloyd steamboat, the “Bremen.” It’s so big, you can see it from afar. The entire thing was made from a mechanical building set. I’m not sure how many of you could rebuild it. To do so you would need the construction kit in size 9, which is the largest, and costs 155 marks. Have you ever heard of the Paris World’s Fair, which all of Europe was talking about in 1900? On all the picture postcards made for the exhibition, you could see in the background of the city of Paris a gigantic wheel with maybe sixteen cabins on moving hinges. The wheel turned slowly, and the people sitting in the cabins could look out over the city, the Seine, and the exhibition below until the double motion, from the swaying of the cabin on its hinges and the rotation of the giant wheel, made them feel sick. Even this wheel has been replicated in a model kit. Its parts move, and the little cabins sway just like the real ones did thirty years ago when your grandparents might have sat in them. All of this was located in the “party games” section. I won’t dwell too much on the games I saw there. You’re surely familiar with all the different variations of Quartet, this lovely game that teaches you to be sly, mischievous, and polite all at once, and you also know the dice games played on big boards like “Game of the Goose,” “Travels Around the World,” “Carnival at Schröppstedt,” as they used to be called; “In the Zeppelin,” “Northern Voyage,” and “The Good Copper,” as they’re called today. I’d rather tell you about an electronic question-and-answer game. It is made up of one little battery, a bulb, and two plugs. You push one of the plugs into a board covered with questions, next to each of which is a little metal rod. Next you look for the answer on a different board. For example, if you stick one plug on the question “Which river flows through Rome?” you then look for the answer with the other plug, and if you find the right spot, the electric bulb lights up. This toy is really quite ingenious, in that the teacher has artfully transformed himself into an electric bulb.
And there are still other, very subtle educational tidbits hidden in toys. I was most impressed with a completely new toy designed for six-year-olds just learning their sums. It is a beautifully polished wooden apple, scented as well, not like a Borsdorfer or Russet apple, but just like wood. Were you to look at it up close, you’d see how cleverly it is constructed, and that it comes apart into six different pieces that can be used to teach arithmetic to the youngest pupils. If only it had a core, it could be used for the older students as well. But is it still a toy? And the so-called activity toys, pearls to be threaded on strings, weaving patterns for kindergarteners, all of which you can find nearby, are these really toys? And decals? And most of all, what about the Oblaten?2 I don’t know. But I’d like to talk to you about the Oblaten. Not just because I liked them as a boy, but also because I put together a very beautiful collection of my mother’s Oblaten, which included things that you can no longer get today in stationery stores, such as entire fairy tales: Tom Thumb, Snow White in colorful detail, Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, Robinson Crusoe, and more. I don’t know why, but I still see these tiny little images, showing the terrible genie with snarling teeth appearing before Aladdin, who’s quaking in terror, or Robinson as he nearly drops his parasol with shock when he first discovers the nibbled human bones on the island — these moments, which are depicted in many children’s books, are always in my head as if I still had my Oblaten albums open before me today. This is a good counterweight to all those kissing turtledoves, cherubs, flower carts, and ruffled angels; you’ll need scissors if you want to remove them from their paper packaging, right next to the manufacturer’s name or “UX 798” or some other such business gibberish printed in little red letters.
As far as I’m concerned, nothing is better than a paper toy, starting with the little folding boats or paper caps, which are usually the ones we encounter first, and onto the insert-books I’d like to tell you about now. Imagine a picture book with just a few pages inside. On the first page maybe there’s a room, on the second a landscape with mountains, fields, and a forest, on the third a city with its streets, gates, public squares, and houses. Now look a little closer and you’ll see that each of these pictures is full of tiny slots: openings between window and windowsill, between threshold and door, between fountain and pavement, between seat and armrest, between river and shore, etc. In the back of such a book there’s a little pocket with all sorts of people, furniture, vehicles, ships, food, and plants, each of which has a little ridge that you can slide into the slots on the pictures. So you can furnish the room in a hundred different ways, decorate the landscape with a hundred different sorts of flowers and animals, and show the city first on a market day and then on a Sunday, and, if you feel like it, you can even have deer and squirrels walking down the street. Sure, books like these no longer exist. But it won’t be long before they’re back again and already you can find some that are just as beautiful. For instance, why not treat yourself to the The Magic Boat by Tom Seidmann-Freud, which works almost the same way as the one I just told you about.3
Now maybe you’re wondering, what does all this have to do with Berlin? In which case I would beg you to put on your thinking caps when I ask you: where in Germany can you imagine taking a tour through the entire kingdom of toys other than here in a Berlin department store? I’m not saying there aren’t toy stores where you can find just as many things. The big difference is that the department stores simply have more space to put out their giant tables so that nothing remains hidden and anyone with eyes gets to look at everything that would otherwise be stowed away in closets and crates. Mind you, it’s been a long road to arrive at these galleries we are wandering through. Most of all, you must not think the toy began as some sort of invention by manufacturers of playthings. On the contrary, the toy emerged gradually from the workshops of wood carvers and tinsmiths. At first, children’s toys were actually produced by craftsmen in their spare time, since toys are essentially objects from everyday life recreated in miniature. The carpenter would make, by order, tiny furniture for dollhouses, the tinsmith and coppersmith the pots and plates for the doll kitchens, and a potter would make the tiny ceramic ware. In short: each craftsman was allotted his share in the creation of such miniaturized household items. However, in the Middle Ages, strict regulations enforced by trade guilds set limits on each professional craft, making proper toy manufacturing impossible. Each master craftsman was only allowed to make that which fell in his particular domain. The carpenter was forbidden to paint his wooden dolls himself; he had to leave the finishing work to the “bismuth painters,” as they were known, while the chandler had to turn to the carpenter if he wanted his wax dolls or angels to hold some sort of wooden object like a candlestick in their hands. You can imagine how unbelievably laborious it must have been in those days to build a dollhouse when so many different craftsmen had to be involved, and this was true right into the nineteenth century. Hence their great value. Early on, only princes could afford them, and they were used as showpieces in castle nurseries, or sometimes they were on exhibit at fairs for paying customers. We know of one such showing. Around 300 years ago a little old lady came to Nuremberg with the idea of earning some money by illustrating to children the basics of proper homemaking, using a dollhouse in which everything was recreated as true-to-life as possible. I suppose the parents of these kids were taken in by her sales pitch and sent their little girls into her tent. But for the kids it was more fun than anything else. And anyway, in reality the interiors of these houses were not at all true-to-life, but only a series of rooms one after the next, cobbled together just for show. Most dollhouses don’t even have stairs to connect the various stories.