Voices Mag

Gottfried Reinhardt (1935-2013) moved outside of the official cultural scene of the GDR with his critical texts. He was denied accreditation as a professional puppeteer, and so he ran his own puppet theatre, in which he controlled all aspects of the business, from stage design to acting. When he finally had to cease operations due to health complications, he donated a large part of his equipment to the Puppentheatersammlung, among them, this puppet of Jocasta.

Puppet theatre and animated movies have a lot in common. One such commonality is Lotte Reiniger, who on one hand was a leading pioneer of early animated film and its techniques, and on the other hand enriched the world of shadow puppetry with her paper cuttings.

What declares itself to be nonsense declares itself to be harmless. Supposedly. Because the consequence of such self-determination is the famous jester's license, which a group of theater people in the GDR also claimed for themselves in the 1980s when they called themselves “Zinnober” and began making Punch and Judy shows for adults. Their play “Die Jäger des verlorenen Verstandes” (Raiders of the Lost Mind) can easily be read by the audience as a mockery of the GDR state system and its toleration is hard to believe in retrospect - but true.

In the spring of 2020, a very special troupe of brightly coloured figures took up residence in the depot of the Puppentheatersammlung. Fishers and farmers, musicians and child gymnasts, not to mention ducks, water buffalos, dragons and fairies. They all belong to the classic cast of Vietnamese water puppetry.