Work and Play: The Production and Consumption of Toys in Germany, 1870–1914 (review)

The history of German industrialization was long dominated by Alexander Gerschenkron’s thesis that Germany made up for its late economic modernization through an oligarchic banking industry that directed investments into trusts and cartels of heavy industries. But scholars have been revising this view, showing how economic growth relied in large part on networks of small- and medium-sized enterprises—so-called flexible specialization—that thrived in regions where state and social institutions gave support to small property owners. This study of the German toy industry is a case study of such flexible specialization. But, it also goes beyond the current literature in showing how a key small industry was shaped as much by new technology and state policy as by an emerging consumer culture and ideas about the individual in the modern, urban world. Work and Play traces how workplace conditions, retailing schemes, and end products were a result of an ongoing negotiation among producers, distributors, and consumers that played out in foreign cities, Christmas markets, department stores, and debates in newspapers, pedagogical journals, and social reform movements.

Global, innovative, and buoyant, the German toy industry was the epitome of the economic dynamism at the turn of the twentieth century. As a key export industry—one third of the toys in the United States were made in Germany, and enterprises in some regions sold eighty percent of their products abroad—it benefited immensely from the telegraph, trains, and steamships. Embracing modernity both culturally and economically, the celebrated Nuremberg metal enterprises sold miniatures of these same modern wonders while introducing new production technologies like electrical lighting, gas motors, and offset lithography that drove down prices so relentlessly that even working-class consumers could now afford toys. The toy industry also pioneered sophisticated marketing techniques like displays in department store windows. Flexible specialization allowed it to adapt rapidly to world events and changing consumer tastes. All this made toy manufacturing one of the fastest-growing industries: from 1895 to 1907, production increased an extraordinary seven-fold. Contrary to what one might expect, the fast growth also happened in the older, labor-intensive putting-out system in which self-employed families assembled wooden toys at home, although competition from the capital-intensive and highly efficient metal toy manufacturers battered the wages of these Heimarbeiter.

The sharp economic analysis in Work and Play of the multi-varied production techniques, distribution networks, and labor relations is in itself a tour de force. But, the book also breaks new ground in showing how changes in urban culture and ideas about childhood structured the industry as much as innovation in organization and technology. The growth of the toy manufacturing and the rhythms of its sales and new designs were determined in large part by the commercialization of Christmas that took place at the end of the nineteenth century. Worried about promoting crass materialism, the middle class insisted on toys that had didactic value. Consequently, because parents wanted to raise their daughters to be good mothers, dolls dominated the toy market for girls. By contrast, because no single toy embodied the masculinity and scientific rationality parents hoped to cultivate in their sons, toys for boys were more various and included building blocks, model trains and battleships, and figurines of soldiers and North Pole adventurers. In a countervailing phenomenon, retailers discovered that spectacle and aestheticized shopping experiences, such as the dazzling displays in the windows of the magnificent new department stores, influenced parents’ choices as much as the instructive potential of the toy. All the while, manufacturers and distributors adapted their goods to the demands of reformers who worried about the often woeful labor conditions in the industry and the bland, monotonous play that some toys encouraged. Work and Play accordingly devotes much attention to the discourses about childhood, gender, fashion, materialism, creativity, healthy workplaces, and the ascendant “rational economic man...