Walking down 'toy' lane...

What better day to visit a toy museum than the day on which you're turning a year older! The Spielzeug (toy) Museum located in the Old Town Hall tower at Marienplatz in Munich, Germany, opened in 1983, about five years before I was born. It houses a unique collection of European and American toys. We enter through a narrow door in the tower and climb to the ticket office on the first floor. Here we take the lift to the top of the tower and walk down through toy history.

Each floor has a single room with displays. Shelves behind glass partitions hold some of the oldest toys made of wood, paper, lead and wax, as well as finds from prehistoric digs, including men and animals made of twigs. The first toys, “were gifts of nature: brightly coloured stones, shiny berries, strangely formed twigs, barks and roots, anything that could be interpreted and worked on creatively,” reads a placard. On one of the bottom shelves are unpainted wooden toys from Val Gardena, a valley in Northern Italy. Interestingly, children there enjoyed playing with these unpainted wooden toys as they stimulated their imagination to see things in colour. There are toys of papier mâché, used since the 19th century to make light and unbreakable playthings. The material was mixed with kaolin clay or plaster of Paris, sometimes adding fine sawdust and casein or flour as a binding agent. Hollow toys were usually made of two moulded halves stitched together.

There's a Nuremberg clothes shop complete with a sample book, hats, rolls of material, a price list and even a hat iron; a toy altar for priests-to-be, with crucifixes, chalices, incense burners; and a Noah’s Ark with animals entering in twos—the detailing is amazing. A few cute stuffed elephants have pins sticking out of them. These Margarete Steiff creations were meant to be pincushions, but kids wanted to use them as toys, and voilà we have the first stuffed, cuddle toy.

The Steiff Pincushion

The museum also documents the origin of the teddy bear. A sign says that, “historians suggest October 26, 1902 as the date on which the final idea of the 'teddy bear' was born. It was the day Richard Steiff (Margaret's nephew and the teddy inventor) went to the circus, where he watched a wrestling match between the daring tamer Biance Braselli and the giant baribal bears”. Typical features of the first Steiff bears were long narrow snouts and limbs (upward-bent paws that were like pipes and claws embroidered with black yarn).

There are also hand-painted tin toys from America, Germany and France that can either be pulled along or wound up. Tin gradually replaced wood, shortly after the process of manufacturing sheet metal and galvanised tin plates from iron was discovered. Soon small workshops specialising in toys started to appear in the New England region of northeast USA.

The next floor has a brilliant collection of steam engines, mechanical tin men and women working or having fun and Elastolin figures.  I'm left awestruck by the scenes—farmhouses and stables, a zoo, exotic and domestic animals, figures of country folk, native Americans, soldiers from the World Wars and more—created by Hausser, one of Germany's most important toy manufacturers. I wonder why all we saw in toy shops as kids were board games, stuffed toys and Barbie dolls. And yes, there's a glass case with more than 100 Barbies as well–from the first version of Ken (Barbie's boyfriend) to Barbie down the ages, since 1959. There are china dolls, doll houses, a model of an ancient kitchen and Nicolas Steiner's walking-talking doll, patented in 1855. The boys' collection has tin robots, rockets and spaceships.

Scene of a toy altar for priests-to-be

The second floor is dedicated to technical toy cars, trains and other means of transport from before World War I, until after World War II. Pre-1875 tin furniture is displayed in a two-room doll house made by Rock and Graner. Cartoons and comic characters on display are: The Yellow Kid, Charlie Chaplin, Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Pinocchio and Popeye.

We end our visit on the first floor that has the oldest dolls made of wax, porcelain and wood. If you really loved your trip to the museum, here you can pick up reproductions of old toys, reprints of old children's books, games and postcards.