Now the collector, but looks a little nervous. Although it is just a toy, of course. But one that is equipped in the Me Collectors Room Berlin Olbricht Foundation, more recently with a Museum Consecrate. Please dear do not squeeze, say Sebastian Köpckes eyes, when you touched the thick-walled rubber body of the Giraffe. It does, however, reveal tender cracks immediately, the ravages of time eating away at the Material of socialist children’s dreams. Because nothing else was in the rubber factory “Red triangle” in Leningrad, at the time the largest rubber factory in Europe, according to a draft of the designer Natalia Tyrkova fabricated toy animal set: an object of Desire of children, who were in the Second world war, the exhausted Soviet Union was hardly a toy.

And if, then hand-crafted from wood or clay, which were based on traditional folk art. Especially since it was in tsarist times, the Russian toy industry, but the well-heeled parents for the edification of the Little ones to dolls and tin toys from France or Germany. So something Light, Flexible, Modern, like the Giraffe or your little sister, the goat, the bear, in addition to a clearly visible Joint is also a squeak valve in the body, in the post-war Soviet Empire in a completely new.

The frog of Natalia Tyrkowa fits with his dancers pose in the disco decade of the Seventies.Photos: Köpcke and Weinhold

It is a favorite, but, the angle of the mouth when Viewing involuntarily lifted Menagerie, compiled by the Berlin collector Sebastian Köpcke and Volker Weinhold, under the title “Zoo Mockba”. Especially in the years 1950 to 1980-produced toys made of celluloid, and polyethylene, such as the famous prophet in his own country. To apply home a little, which is how Volker Weinhold told, were never the subject of a separate exhibition, and to be discovered only recently, tentatively, and by collectors.

This is amazing because the quality of the design is so striking. If you look at the Giraffe with cub of the 1929-born sculptor Lev Smorgon, you do not know where the toy ends and the sculpture begins. The abstracted body in Yellow and Orange could also have come from the air balloon butterflies are among the contemporary artists – Jeff Koons. It was created by one of those well-known sculptor from St. Petersburg, the Sebastian Köpcke in his Research on the tracks of the toy also has visited. Today Smorgon work in steel, stone and wood, and wool actually know nothing of his beginnings as a Designer, tells Köpcke. “From the toy factory, he has withdrawn already in the late Seventies.”

The lifestyle of a Generation of Survivors

The shape of beginning of flowering, with the focus on Moscow, but in Leningrad, at the beginning of the fifties. Since the state’s Directive, in the framework of the socialist awakening now finally also the child to turn to fired up, a whole group of graduates from the Leningrad art College. Suddenly design in the Soviet toy industry the freedom to develop inexpensive materials and production capacity in order to try out New things and a form of their own language. In the art of socialist realism of the propagandist is symbolically charged pictorial language, a tight corset. However, in everyday design, there is now room for mythical creatures with two heads and Tails, for the Soviet animated film aesthetics-inspired creatures, for animals with absurd extendable accordion bellies, the native of the Czech Republic Libuše Nyklova in the sixties, and for Lew Smorgons fawns, the universe seem to be with your Manga-eyes of an Alien to come. Plaste and Elaste is suddenly the spirit of life feeling of the artistic avant-garde.

It is the lifestyle of a Generation of Survivors, the siege of Leningrad, the breaks here in a playful way. A the in 2006 deceased sculptor Lew Razumowsky, its funny to each other dangling red monkey nothing from the fate of their Creator ancestors. Razumowsky was shot down on the Front a Arm, such as the collectors tell, the imagine on the biographical tables of the paths of life, and the artistic context of the main toy Creator inside. 200 of its approximately 400 parts comprehensive collection in the August street. Chronologically initiated in the forties, still quite naturalistic, therefore, a para-discipline, elephants, lions, camels and polar bears of the sculptor Boris Vorobyev (1911 – 1990) at the beginning of this short artistic toy flower.

Bambi and his friends. Lew Smorgons deer was founded in 1965.Photos: Köpcke and Weinhold

the two Mitfünfziger Köpcke and Weinhold grew up in East Berlin, by the way, has nothing to do with your exhibition. Also, if you have one or the other animal in the GDR-Childhood came to me in the hands. “Who would have us just as excited, if they would come from France,” says Weinhold. He has discovered the toys by accident. In the year 2013 in the chamber of wonders of the digital modern age, vulgo: on Ebay. Because he went after a toy ships, the two on collection, documentation and exhibitions to specialized photographers and graphic designers a Look. Within a few years, the two wore then with the help of the St. Petersburg-based toy expert Daria Soboleva animal to animal on the Internet and on various Russia traveling together, were living Sculptors and sculptors or their descendants, and revealed the shed design niche as well as it went.

Behind the glass of the issued and large format photographs vividly staged, designs such as Elena Podwoloskajas long belly of a Dachshund, the appropriate Aura. It feeds on the magic of good Form. And the desire, short and strong squeeze.

the Me Collectors Room/Olbricht Foundation, Auguststr. 68, to 22.4., Wed-Mon 12-18 H, The Collector’s Guide: 14.3., 18 PM

More about

photographs in the Me Collectors Room Lust to eternity

Christiane Meixner

Twelve of the Newsletter, twelve districts: Our people-the Newsletter from all districts of Berlin you can order for free here: leute.tagesspiegel.de