The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood by Patricia Anne Simpson (review)

In this expansive study, Patricia Anne Simpson explores how concepts of the child and children’s play worlds were constructed and deployed over four centuries on both sides of the Atlantic. Informed by postcolonial and migration studies as well as social histories of childhood and child rearing, Simpson’s approach is as multifaceted as the texts and objects she brings to her analysis. As noted in the preface to the book, this study functions as a search for “a narrative about the purpose of play, the intersection of material culture and cultural identities, and the past of the future-oriented study of childhood and its accessories” (xi). Casting a “wide evidentiary net” (13), Simpson presents a diverse array of texts, illustrations, and material objects that together offer a compelling picture of how children at play become modern subjects, shaped by discourses of gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality.

Six of the book’s seven chapters function as complementary pairs, both chronologically and thematically. The first two chapters address how German-speaking children of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries learned to play while parents learned to structure and supervise that play, all in the name of a moral education that came to be associated with the middle class. Here the focus is on early modern Protestant hymns as agents of pedagogy, how-to manuals that purported to professionalize maternal parenting, and books for child readers that warned against wild, unrestricted play. In chapters 4 and 5, Simpson turns her attention to globalized imagined play worlds through analyses of texts set in Africa and America. The colonial locations of the children’s stories presented here taught young readers how to be “imperial citizens” (140) by offering up myths of German superiority in exotic realms that constructed racial hierarchies within the play world. In the final two chapters of the book, Simpson looks at the import of ideas and objects of play from German-speaking Europe to the United States. Chapter 6 addresses the history of the kindergarten and the way in which play within that structured sphere was viewed as a manifestation of a child’s character and imagination. The final chapter, “Empire of Toys,” zeroes in on playthings manufactured by the German-American Schoenhut company. Through an examination of Schoenhut toys, Simpson draws a concrete connection between playthings and the development of gendered, racial, and class-based identities while also pointing to the now-familiar way in which toys (and toy advertisements) empowered children as consumers.

Chapter 3, “Revolutions in Play,” departs from this structure of paired chapters and also differs from the others in its focus on a single figure: Goethe. Here Simpson offers “case studies of two objects in Goethe’s purview” (93): the toy guillotine and the yoyo. The yoyo appears in one of Goethe’s Venetian epigrams, where it functions as a metaphor for erotic play between adults. The toy guillotine, however, does not figure in any of Goethe’s writings, nor does it appear that Goethe possessed or even necessarily knew of such a thing. Instead, Simpson draws a somewhat tenuous connection to the toy through a letter from Goethe’s mother in which she refuses Goethe’s request that she purchase war toys (specifically cannons) for his son for Christmas. While cannons and a guillotine both have the ability to kill, the very specific historical associations with the guillotine preclude, I would argue, this interpretive leap. As a result, I found it difficult to buy into Simpson’s description of the guillotine as “a generational bone of contention” (114) in Goethe’s family or the assertion of “eccentric impulses indulged in Goethe’s desire for the killing machine” (115). In my view, this chapter unfortunately detracts from the compelling interpretive arc that Simpson establishes in the six chapters discussed above.

Taken as a whole, however, The Play World guides readers on multiple journeys across the Atlantic, tracing the impact of German play theories...