It prompts children’s affection for the speculative space of fairy tales and silly stories.

But play is not something that resides in a world far from worldly affairs. Play involves toys, and toys emerge from the world of work, from particular webs of social relations, as Benjamin observed of the Russian toys that he saw in a Soviet museum during a 1926–7 visit.41 These were made by craft labour, and they had found a safe asylum in the museum. The toys would not survive outside the museum’s cabinets. The web of relations that formed them was dying. Though precious, they could not be works of art precisely because of their relation to the hand that made them and the hand that would play with them. In a note, Benjamin observes, ‘Toy is hand tool – not artwork.’42 That is to say, toys are tools for grasping the domain of the greater forms on which they base themselves. Handmade and manipulated by the hand as the child plays, they allow the child to pry a way into the cosmos of play and beyond that into the world itself.

Play is also present where Benjamin imagines strategies for revolutionary overhaul. His 1928 review essay ‘Toys and Play’ considers the repetitive aspect of children’s playful engagements.43 The essay reflects on the ways in which children play, a topic which, according to him, has fallen by the wayside. He argues further that children’s play proposes a mode of thinking that extends beyond itself, much like folk art, another ‘primitivist’ form that has the character of a model: ‘Folk art and the worldview of the child demanded to be seen as collectivist ways of thinking.’44 Children take on the form of the new collective. Collectivist modes of thinking will, according to Benjamin, find historical shape in the Russian Revolution. In post-revolutionary Moscow he saw how ‘the liberated pride of the proletariat is matched by the emancipated bearing of the children’.45 The Bolsheviks conjoined the action of collective emancipation – or at least its outward sign – and the lives of children. In ‘Programme for a Proletarian Children’s Theatre’ (1929), Benjamin observes: ‘Just as the first action of the Bolsheviks was to hoist the Red flag, so their first instinct was to organize the children.’46

Where there are children, then there is also the work of learning. Benjamin did not disassociate play from pedagogy, and pedagogy was something that he returned to in various reviews and writings, beginning with his first published piece in 1912. This was a scathing critique of Lily Braun’s The Emancipation of Children: A Speech to School Youth.47 As Benjamin writes, the ‘new youth, who out of the consciousness of themselves as youthful people place once more a higher sense and purpose in their existence’,48 render today’s schools as ruins. Theirs is a revolution in consciousness, in modes of apperception and apprehension – a point that anticipates his subsequent work on fantasy. As he matures, Benjamin builds on his early insight that play and playfulness facilitate learning, a communist learning, perhaps, that unlearns bourgeois morality and undermines the training for war and death. For example, Benjamin’s ‘Four Tales’ draw on the folk wisdom expressed in parables from the past, whilst also echoing aspects of Brecht’s work, where the anecdotal form is used as a modern learning model. Morality is undone by a politics of modernism.

Benjamin undertook his own experiments in pedagogy, broadcasting regularly on German radio to the children and youth on topics such as liquor bootleggers, Berlin dialects, the petrification of Pompeii, counterfeit stamps, slum housing, manufacture, the legend of Caspar Hauser, the history of the Bastille prison, witch trials and the history of toys. Benjamin spoke about the history and curiosities of Berlin, about figures from the shadow side of life and about catastrophes. Through these broadcasts, as well as radio plays and playful programmes that set riddles or puzzles, he drew the children of Berlin and Frankfurt into modes of thinking, perceiving, drawing connections and counteracting the conventional history of their cities, their dialect and their homes, revealing cities within the city and illuminating their forms.

The German word for play or game is Spiel. This same word relates to gambling. Der Spieler is a gambler. The activity of gambling and the figure of the gambler appear at various points in Benjamin’s work. Gambling is a decayed form of divination. In his file on ‘Prostitution, Gambling’ in The Arcades Project, Benjamin wonders about the links between the two: ‘Were fortune-telling cards around earlier than playing cards? Does the card game represent a deterioration of soothsaying technique? Perceiving the future is surely decisive in card games, too.’49 In his first sketch for The Arcades Project, Benjamin draws a link between automata and gods.

In front of the doorway to the ice rink, the local pub at those day-trip resorts, the tennis court: penates. Guarding the threshold: The hen who lays the praline-eggs of gold, the vending machine that punches out our names, machines for games of chance, the automated fortune teller. Strangely enough, such machines do not flourish in the town, but are more likely to be found as something at places where day trips happen, such as beer gardens in the outskirts. And, on a Sunday afternoon, out and about on the hunt for a little greenery, one is also heading to enigmatic thresholds. P.S.: coin-operated automatic scales – today’s gnothi seauton (Know Thyself).50

In the game, a sporty one perhaps, in the act of gambling, placing the ball in the roulette wheel or laying the card, in divination by cards, entrails or stars, each player is aware of what move to make only at a subliminal bodily level. They mobilise, if they are to be successful, a motor reflex that works below the workings of the conscious mind.