Spielzeugmuseum

Description

In the historic centre of Nürnberg the Spielzeugmuseum Nürnberg (also Museum Lydia Bayer) on 1,400 m² presents the cultural history of toys from antiquity to the present. As a municipal museum, opened in 1971, it is among the internationally known institutions of its kind.

The museum is housed in the Haller’schen Haus at Karlstraße 13–15. The property is already mentioned in municipal records in the late 14th century; it appears as a patrician house in 1517. In the 17th century the façade received a three-story, richly decorated gable field in the style of the Italian Renaissance. In the courtyard there is a wooden Dockengalerie typical of Nürnberg; in the 18th century a wooden Chörlein and a stucco ceiling with Rococo ornamentation and half-relief bird representations were added. Workshops and storage formerly occupied the ground floors and cellars of the courtyard complexes. Parts of the ensemble were destroyed in the Second World War; after repair and reconstruction work the city purchased the property in 1961 and integrated a new museum building behind the historic façade. The building is a station of the Historische Meile Nürnberg.

The basis of the collection consisted of around 12,000 objects that Lydia und Paul Bayer had assembled over decades. Their holdings were taken over by the city in 1966 and made accessible as a museum collection in the following decades. The exhibition space was expanded in 1989 and increased to 1,400 m² by the roof extension in 1998. The museum is part of the network Museen der Stadt Nürnberg, which includes several municipal institutions as well as the Deutsches Spielearchiv Nürnberg.

In addition to the permanent exhibition on the history of toys, the institution organises educational and presentation formats that make the holdings accessible. In 2019, together with the Bayerisches Spiele-Archiv München-Haar, it was entered into the Register Guter Praxisbeispiele des bayerischen Landesverzeichnisses as Intangible Cultural Heritage in the field of promoting board games. Since the opening in 1971 the Gockelreiterbrunnen by the Nürnberg artist Michael Mathias Prechtl has stood in front of the museum: a brightly painted ceramic figure on a tube in an exposed-aggregate concrete basin that visualizes traditional small-fountain forms and the city’s toy-making tradition.