Lego or Playmobil?

For Oliver Schaffer, this is not a serious question.

After all, he sees himself as an artist and storyteller, not a builder.

Even as a child, he much preferred to create appropriate scenes around his characters.

"With Lego, however, the figures are only accessories," says the Kiel native and now Hamburg-based choice.

In addition, he doesn't like the “knobs” of the Lego bricks for aesthetic reasons.

There are also emotional reasons why he focuses on the characters: his first character was a Playmobil circus employee who was given to him by his father when he was three years old.

It was the beginning of a great passion that initially concentrated entirely on the world of the circus and steadily increased its collection.

Oliver Bock

Correspondent for the Rhein-Main-Zeitung for the Rheingau-Taunus-Kreis and for Wiesbaden.

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The Playmobil, which was only introduced to the toy market in 1974, remained his passion, and Schaffer played circus performances until he was 14 years old.

For a good ten years he stopped touching the colorful plastic parts.

But then his past caught up with him.

Because Playmobil had archived a letter from the young collector along with a photo of a circus world and dug it out again for the company's 30th anniversary.

Schaffer was allowed to design a large circus scene, which was shown not only in Germany, but even in the Louvre in Paris.

Experienced exhibition designer

The 42-year-old Schaffer is now an accomplished Playmobil exhibition designer.

He designed and built 49 shows with more than five million visitors.

For two years now, the official Playmobil brand ambassador has been able to live from this passion for colorful plastic worlds.

Because if you set up around ten exhibitions a year, you can no longer work on the side as a musical employee.

In Kiel, Schaffer stores around 700 large boxes with around 300,000 figures and a million individual parts.

He has around 5000 figures with him to Eberbach Monastery, where his 50th exhibition will open on Sunday.

He still has to use the time until then to set up the last three of the eleven scenes in the monastery.

Schaffer alone has 400 monks in his luggage, and he is delighted that Playmobil was able to contribute 350 of them from a production that has long since been discontinued.

Schaffer is currently “installing” around 50,000 individual parts in the former Cistercian abbey.

The scenes are intended to represent important stages in Eberbach's history, from the legend of the founding of the monastery to the abbey as the main venue of the Rheingau Music Festival.

The centerpiece is the large Rheingau diorama and the monastery complex in the abbey museum.

In doing so, Schaffer attaches great importance to the fact that he is not interested in a "model building" exhibition that is true to the original, but rather in his own artistic interpretation.

“I mix up all the Playmobil worlds,” says Schaffer, and that's why he also uses elements from the Playmobil western world, the Roman arena and “Africa” to create the monastery scenes.

A white canvas behind glass

For him the empty showcase is a kind of white canvas.

It is only during the construction that it is decided how exactly the scenery will be designed.

Details are very important: if the deer looks at the ground in front of it because it is eating, or if it lifts its head and looks after a bird of prey.

Which friar gets a beard and which doesn't?

Which vegetables are grown in the monastery garden?

And where are the mouse and the frog placed?

A monastery ghost also wanders through the complex, although it has to be found by the visitors first.

For the museum, the family exhibition, which will be shown until October 28, is intended to be a sign of life that can be seen from afar: “We're back,” says board member Timo Georgi after the long phases of the pandemic-related closure since March last year.

In addition to the music festival and the markets in the monastery, which are planned again from September, the Playmobil exhibition is intended to bring as much audience as possible to the monastery.

Schaffer is confident that this can succeed, because Playmobil addresses all generations, and everyone can find scenes and characters that they are enthusiastic about and with whom they can identify.

And he hopes that many children will be inspired and act out the stories at home with their Playmobil characters.

Schaffer doesn't do that, however.

When he returns home in Hamburg after two weeks of setting up the exhibition, he won't leave any plastic around him: “My apartment is a Playmobil-free zone”.

The exhibition “Playmobil Monastery History (s)” will be shown in the monastery from July 18 to October 28, Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Admission to the monastery costs ten euros, reduced seven euros