Engineers or Artists? Toys, Class and Technology in Wilhelmine Germany

Abstract

Ganaway argues that toys allowed millions of comfortably situated Germans to participate in a debate in Imperial Germany about the role modern technology would play in shaping the ideal middle-class citizen. Germany's nascent consumer culture easily facilitated this argument. Entrepreneurs envisioned the ideal German as a masculine engineer controlling human and natural environments. They marketed accurately miniaturized toys designed to turn boys into manipulators of technology and girls into domestic managers. Artists, intellectuals and maternal feminists demanded humanistically-trained individuals who could unite Germany's fractious society. They called for hand-crafted miniatures that emphasized imagination and creativity and blurred gender boundaries. Neither side wanted to entirely destroy the other, but both felt compelled to argue that only their vision could ensure a strong Germany. In the end, the engineers and entrepreneurs won this debate, but only at the cost of assimilating the most appealing aspects of reform toys into the factory process. Artists and intellectuals carved out a space for themselves and their vision of the middle-class via the market which outlived the Kaiserreich. This shows that consumer culture permits personal self-fashioning; while it tends to reinforce the power of dominant social groups it is remarkably permeable to subversive ideas.