Toys

All excerpts from 'Toys', written by W.Trier, illustrated by O.Seyffert. First published in the original German, Berlin c.1920. First English translated edition quoted here, Unwin c.1930

A little girl will build a Garden of Eden out of some sand and pebbles and blades of grass. She puts some gaudy flowers in it and is happy in her play. Yes, she is much richer than we are. She creates a paradise out of trifles, a paradise which we can never succeed in creating with all our superior wisdom. And then her mother comes. She does not see the work of art, the paradise, but she thinks that perhaps the child may get dirty. She only sees sand, earth and pebbles. She drags her child aways and scolds her. But it is not from the 'dirt' alone she tears her, but from the Heaven her little soul was dwelling in.




Little Anne strokes and kisses her simple dolly a thousand times a day and loves it dearly. Her imagination dresses it today in a blue silk dress, and it is a princess. Tomorrow it is a poor suffering child that has to be tucked up in its warm cot. The day after tomorrow it is a proud rich prince - for there is no limit to imagination. And if the parents of this happy child give her a new doll with real curls, and which can open and close its eyes and really cry when it is clasped to her heart and wear an expensive dress...well, then the child no longer needs her imagination; the doll is quite perfect and there is nothing more to be made of it, no room left for imagination and form. Of course the time will come when Anne no longer values her first simple doll and yearns for the second one. But the longer she cannot have everything, the richer she remains.




A little boy is sitting on chairs turned topsy turvy and is puffing, panting and whistling. He is playing at trains. He himself is the engine. His coloured wooden toy figures are the passengers who get in and out. How much better off he is than his friend who has got a mechanical train which runs 'quite alone' round the room. Its owner cannot do much with it as his part of the game is done when he has wound it up. At last he examines the works, breaks them, and the expensive toy is a dead thing.




Christmas is the children's festival, and the day for toys. But our children are not only to have presents given to them. They must give presents they have made themselves. They must deck the Christmas tree with decorations they have made themselves; with coloured and golden stars. They will then feel the same joy that the dwellers in the Erz mountains feel, when each year they make anew the toys for the festival of festivals. Weeks before Christmas old and young are all busy making painted figures of the infant Jesus in the manger with the shepherds round it, also candlesticks in the shape of miners and the multi-coloured 'mountain spiders' as the wooden candelabra that are hung up at Christmas are called. And old and young are merry at their work.





It is this merriness we need so sorely. We town dwellers 'buy' our festival. what a difference!