You surely know the so-called Nuremberg toys. Remember your Noah’s Ark, all the tiny painted animals and human figurines? On my tour I was astounded to see how this biblical and pastoral world of toys has grown to include many modern urban scenes. Alongside Noah’s Ark, there are now rental barracks, railway stations, swimming pools, and even Berolina sightseeing cars, complete with dolls dressed as foreign drivers and passengers. In a little while we’ll get to why these are called Nuremberg toys. The truth is that today most of them come from the Ore Mountains and Thuringia. These toys have been manufactured there for several hundred years. Their story once again shows how the manufacture and sale of toys back then differed from that of today. It’s not by chance that the villages where these toys were created lay deep in the forests of Thuringia and Bohemia, where the long winter days, when traffic on the snowed-over streets and icy passes came to a halt, forced the farmers and craftsmen who lived off this traffic in the warmer seasons to find other work to keep them busy. With wood so readily available, naturally they took up carving. At first it was just wooden spoons, kitchen utensils, simple needle boxes and the like. But those with any talent were not content for long, and soon ventured to carve little dolls, small wagons, and animals they knew from their local surroundings. Merchants passing through the area in the summer would buy up these charming and inexpensive works of art to bring home as gifts for their children. The easy earnings appealed to the carvers who, seeking more than just seasonal sales, packed up their goods in baskets and peddled them across the country. Businessmen then began snapping up these toys and selling them all over the world. The dolls would eventually reach Astrakhan and Archangel, Petersburg and Cadiz, even Africa and the West Indies, as sailors took them overseas to trade the colorful little figures with the natives in exchange for jewels, pearls, bronze, and other such valuable wares.
You must be thinking: what a strange toy tour; we’re almost finished and he’s yet to mention either dolls or soldiers. And you would be right. But today he’s dwelt on the more peculiar and unconventional, and so he will continue until the very end. He will tell you what has surprised him most on this tour. It was not a new discovery, but something he had not thought about in an awfully long time: scaly bath toys. On a piece of soft cotton are ducks and goldfish, and in the middle, a ship that is also scaly and comes with colorful metal sails and a magnetic stick that a child can use to steer the boats while his mother washes his hair. The entire thing was coated in celluloid, which made the fish, ships, and ducks look like they were frozen in ice. It reminded me of the smallest and most exciting of toys, those you can’t touch because they’re behind glass, like the ships, crucifixes, and collieries enclosed in sealed bottles. Have you ever seen these bottles? Have you ever racked your brains figuring out how those things get in there? I have, for years. And it took years before I learned how they do it, how sea captains, who bring them home after long journeys, go about creating such things. It’s not sorcery, just patience that is required, the immense patience possessed only by a skipper who, in his solitude at sea, has nothing to miss out on. All the parts of the ship or crucifix, connected by threads, are movable and narrowly packed together so they can fit through the neck of the bottle. Once they are inside, all the pieces and joints are pulled upright with long pins and tweezers until the ship, crucifix, or whatever else takes its proper form. Finally, colored sealing wax is dripped to make the waves or rocks and to permanently set the little houses or figurines. The inside of the bottle looks like something out of the magical land of Vadutz, as described by the poet Clemens Brentano: “All the magical mountains from storybooks, the world of fables and fairy tales, Himmelaya, Meru, Albordi, Kaf, Ida, Olympus, and the Glass Mountains lie for me in the little land of Vadutz.”4 In his imagination Brentano brought together all the toys that he loved into one country that he called Vadutz. He tells us this in the introduction to his most wonderful fairy tale: Gockel, Hinkel, and Gackeleia. Now that our toy tour is finished, you have something to wish for on your next birthday. But what I wish from you is that you remember our tour, if sometime later you happen to read the story of Gockel, Hinkel, and Gackeleia.
“Berliner Spielzeugwanderung II,” GS, 7.1, 105–11. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.
Broadcast on Radio Berlin, March 22, 1930. Benjamin dated the typescript “Berlin Radio, 22 March, 1930,” and for this date the Funkstunde announced “Youth Hour (Berlin), Speaker: Dr. Walter Benjamin” from 3:30–3:45 pm.
1 Radio advertising in the Weimar Republic was controlled and regulated by the centralized Postal Ministry, and, in contrast to the commercial model of the United States, where advertising paid for broadcasting, the German system was based on subscription, requiring listeners to pay a licensing fee to receive transmissions. While some kinds of commercially sponsored programming were permissible, including the indirect advertisements of programs financed by private companies seeking to promote their products by having them featured on air, advertising was explicitly scheduled and highly regulated.
2 Oblaten were embossed, colorful, small-format images mass-produced in the second half of the nineteenth century. Collected by children as well as adults, they were placed in scrapbooks and cards and were a trend in Germany, Austria, and England.
3 Tom Seidmann-Freud (pseudonym of Martha Gertrude Seidmann-Freud, 1892–1930), writer and illustrator, niece of Sigmund Freud. Her book, Das Zauberboot [The Magic Boat] (1929), featured movable parts. Benjamin discusses her work in “Chichleuchlauchra, Zu einer Fibel” (1930) and “Grünende Anfangsgründe, Noch etwas zu den Spielfibeln” (1931), in GS, 3, 267–72, 311–14.