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

2021; German Studies Association; Volume: 44; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/gsr.2021.0088

2164-8646

Maureen O. Gallagher,

German Literature and Culture Studies

Reviewed by: The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood by Patricia Anne Simpson Maureen O. Gallagher The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood. By Patricia Anne Simpson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. Pp. 312. Cloth $94.95. ISBN 978-0271086996. A seventeenth-century dollhouse boasting more than one thousand pieces. Model guillotines from the age of revolution and toy cannons that Goethe's mother refused to buy for her grandchild. A Bilderbogen featuring Knecht Ruprecht's misadventures in colonial Cameroon. A toy piano produced by a company founded by a German immigrant to the United States. Patricia Anne Simpson connects all of these objects in an intricate story about the development of a transatlantic play world that encompasses both the physical spaces and objects of children's play and their imaginative and literary counterparts. The Play World is an engaging read with a compelling argument about the unique contribution of German arts and letters—through toys, children's literature, and pedagogical texts—that offers a new understanding of the role of play in modern childhood. In her first chapter on what she terms the "Protestant play ethic," Simpson traces changing views of the role of play in children's religious education through close readings of Protestant hymns and verses. A skepticism of play and a perceived need [End Page 609] for children to renounce play and embrace an adult life of prayer give way to an understanding of play as a key means of cultivating religious sensibility and community. A growing emphasis on the importance of parents in the religious education of children provides a transition to Simpson's second chapter on the role of play and parenting in the Enlightenment. Here she demonstrates a shift in the understanding of play in childhood by reading children's literature alongside parenting advice manuals showing the professionalization of parenting and the emergence of gendered roles for parents, with the supervision of play a task assigned to mothers. In another chapter, Simpson analyzes Goethe as a "player, parent, and poet" (24) through his reception in the United States and his relationship to toys—the yoyo and the miniature guillotine—that connect to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. Two further chapters analyze texts and toys about Africa and the Americas to show how the world entered the domestic playroom and children learned to think colonially, cultivate a desire for acquisition, and develop a white settler mentality. Simpson's final two chapters consider the spread of German ideas about childhood through Fröbel's reception in the US and Great Britain and demonstrate the ascendency of toys as "agents of historically transmitted national identity" (208) through readings of transatlantic networks of toy production and consumption in the decades before World War I. Simpson's study is sophisticated in its methodology, analysis, and careful selection of material. Simpson focuses largely on the material culture of toys and books and offers close readings of these material artifacts of play alongside works like parenting manuals, pedagogical theory, and children's literature to reveal how the changing understanding of play is embedded in larger societal contexts. She does not restrict herself solely to canonical figures or popular texts, but instead traces lines of influence and networks of connection through toys, texts, ideas, and people that cross the Atlantic and impact the development of the play world. In her own words, each chapter "gathers the threads of a transatlantic narrative that centers around the developing child-parent constellation as a subject of public discourse" (24). In her chapter on the Protestant play ethic, for example, she examines hymns and verses written by Henriette Catharina Freifrau von Gersdorff, an important supporter of Pietism who was known as the "Fürstin unter den deutschen Mädchen"; her grandson and ward, Nikolaus Ludwig Count von Zinzendorf, the founder of Herrnhut, the center of the Moravian Brethren; and Zinzendorf's contemporary, Ernst Gottlieb Woltersdorf, who worked at August Francke's Halle orphanage, a project supported by Gersdorff. She connects these close readings that demonstrate a changing understanding of the role of play to a collection of seventeenth-century Nuremberg dollhouses—objects from the...