Kunst und Spiel

Kunst und Spiel was founded by Michael Peter, who began not with a shop but with an exhibition space on the third floor of his own apartment building on Georgenstrasse in Munich's Schwabing district. His guiding principle was selective: toys and materials chosen according to pedagogical and ecological criteria drawn from Waldorf education, at a time when mass-produced plastic toys imported from the United States were rapidly displacing wooden and natural-material toys across the German market. The apartment exhibition drew enthusiastic support from people connected to the Waldorf School movement, the Anthroposophical Society, and the Christian Community, and on the strength of that response Peter opened a small ground-floor shop two years later, in September 1956, at Leopoldstrasse 48 -- the address the store still occupies. That continuity makes Kunst und Spiel one of Schwabing's longer-running independent retailers, predating the district's transformation into one of Munich's best-known shopping and nightlife quarters. The shop has held to its founding premise across seven decades: durable, ecologically considered children's books, toys, and craft materials, sold from the same Leopoldstrasse address it moved into shortly after opening, at a moment when that emphasis on natural materials ran directly against, rather than with, the prevailing toy-industry trend.