Toy Museum

Dolls, Dolls' Houses, Kitchens

Traditional education aimed to prepare little girls for their role as mistress of the household through play. A series of dolls' kitchens uses examples from four centuries to show how precisely household management was modelled in its various regional and social forms. Selected utensils from dolls' kitchens demonstrate techniques for the preparation of foodstuffs. Shopping at sumptuously furnished market stalls and in shops rounds off the household management section.

Dolls' houses and dolls show how girls were introduced through play to the topics of lifestyle, family and fashion. The styles of the dolls' houses exhibited range from Biedermeier via Historism and Art Nouveau to the 1940s. They not only illustrate changes in lifestyle, but also paint a vivid picture of bourgeois family life. The well-stocked toy fashion shops are also highly important cultural documents. Finally, numerous exhibits document the development of dolls from fashion objects and teaching aids to playthings between about 1750 and the 1950s.

Playing Figures

A room with a lovely Rococo stucco ceiling - part of the original features of the house - is home to historic figures fashioned from tin, paper, composite materials, celluloid or plastic. Early pieces by Nuremberg or Fürth manufacturers mainly show scenes and motifs from everyday life. They document the high level of skill of local tin founders and engravers which made Franconia the Mecca of the tin figure world in the 19th century.

E. P. Lehmann Toys

E. P. Lehmann Patentwerk is one of the really big names in the history of toys. Founded by Ernst Paul Lehmann in Brandenburg near Berlin in 1881, the creative design and innovative mechanics of their toys soon gained the company a worldwide reputation. Automobiles, trucks, zeppelins and a wealth of funny animals and human figures enchanted children over many decades. Today, the company, based in Nuremberg since 1950, is mostly known for its very popular LGB model train sets.

The new permanent exhibition established in 2002, shows a vivid and comprehensive panorama of the company's history. With over 300 exhibits,this section stages the world's most comprehensive collection of the famous Lehmann tin toys.

Optical Toys

Until the end of the 19th century, a wealth of long-forgotten media satisfied the visual curiosity of children and adults alike, before the present-day flood of images. Shadow theatre and paper theatre in the family home enabled dramatic renderings of stories for young and old. At fairs, travelling shows took their spell-bound audiences to foreign worlds, using peep shows and magic lanterns. Small-scale variations of these - many of them manufactured in Nuremberg - provided entertainment and education for bourgeois families. Folding prospects and back-lit dioramas furnished attractive three-dimensional representations of historic scenes and sites.

After about 1850, the photographic technique of stereoscopy brought a new quality of three-dimensional representation. And with zoetrope, magic drum and praxinoscope, pictures gradually started moving, too. It was, however, only the invention of film at the turn of the 20th century which made the major leap into the cosmos of truly moving pictures possible.

This museum section gives a fascinating glimpse of the attractive world of optical toys - and presents the opportunity of exploring the functioning of magic drum and stereoscopy.