Crafted Figures Make German History: Notes from Berlin
Loren Kruger*
Abstract
Puppets do not feel pain, but puppet masters can flip or fling puppets into positions that look and feel painful to empathetic audiences. Accompanied by the puppeteer’s dramatically varied voices and gestures, these figures express elation and joy as well as fear, and so express and impress psychic and physical violence, and illuminate the worlds shaped by violence and resilience against violence. The term “crafted figure” captures the expressive grace and political thrust of these performers in what one critic described as dokumentarisches Figurentheater, documentary-adjacent theatre whose crafted figures, moved by the hands, face, and full-body engagement of the master craftsman-puppeteer, animate ghosts from history. Master puppeteer Nikolaus Habjan trained as a director of musical theatre in Vienna but returned to his native Graz to attend master classes in puppet making with Australian expatriate Neville Tranter. Habjan started crafting famous figures–Epilogue for Michael Jackson— in 2010, the year that Jackson died—but his most noted works are F. Zawrel: erbbiologisch und minderwertig (2012) and Böhm (2018), which tell vivid stories about individuals whose distinct experiences of the violence and, in the latter case also the allure, of National Socialism offer lessons that are timelier than ever today.
Keywords: puppetry in Austria and Germany, Figurentheater, political theatre, Nazi legacy
Discussed in this essay: Brechts Gespensters, at the Berliner Ensemble; F. Zawrel: erbbiologisch und sozial minderwertig; Böhm, and Schicklgrüber, at the Deutsches Theater. Berlin, May 2025.
Hitler and Goebbels quarrel over the final victory as Allied bombs smash the city of Berlin above their bunker. A child lies crumpled in pain inflicted by a so-called doctor. A cantankerous old man in a wheelchair waves an imaginary baton to recordings of music from his conducting glory days. Marx and Thatcher tussle over the value of capital and the meaning of society, while God plays dice with the universe.
All of these characters make their appearance on stage as crafted figures or puppets. Puppets do not feel pain, but puppeteers can flip or fling puppets into positions that look and feel painful to empathetic audiences. Accompanied by the puppeteer’s dramatically varied voices and gestures, these figures express elation and joy as well as fear, and so express and impress psychic and physical violence, and illuminate the worlds shaped by violence and resilience against violence.[1] Puppet and puppet theatre are serviceable terms, but “crafted figure” captures the expressive grace and political thrust of these manufactured but inspirational performers in what one anonymous critic described as dokumentarisches Figurentheater, theatre whose crafted figures, moved by the hands, face, and full-body engagement of the master craftsman-puppeteer, animate ghosts from history before our eyes (Habjan).
Master puppeteer Nikolaus Habjan trained as a director of musical theatre in Vienna but returned to his native Graz to attend master classes in puppet making with Australian expatriate Neville Tranter. Habjan started early crafting famous figures–Becoming Peter Pan—Epilogue for Michael Jackson premiered in 2010, the year that Jackson died—but his most noted works are F. Zawrel: erbbiologisch und minderwertig (2012) and Böhm (2018), which tell vivid stories about individuals in Austria whose distinct experiences of the violence and, in the latter case also the allure, of National Socialism, offer lessons that are timelier than ever today. Many Austrians preferred after World War II to think of themselves as Nazism’s first victims rather than as willing collaborators who welcomed native son Adolf Hitler and his annexation of Austria to the “New German Reich” in 1938; despite belated acknowledgments of complicity such as the monument erected on Vienna’s Heldenplatz to Austrian Jews murdered by fellow Austrians as well as Germans, this legacy of denial will not go away (Judt). Having worked with Tranter on Schicklgrüber (2003), a piece inspired by Hitler’s father’s original name, Habjan created masterfully crafted figures to animate this history of Austrian Nazi collaboration sometimes subtly, sometimes bluntly. F. Zawrel: erbbiologisch und sozialminderwertig and Böhm both originated in Habjan’s hometown Graz, the second city of Austria whose history is more complex than the images thrown up by the high school shooting in mid-2025. Graz is in southeastern Austria at the opposite end of the country from Hitler’s birthplace–Braunau am Inn in the northwest corner close to Germany. Nonetheless, as Deutsches Theater dramaturg Karla Mäde noted in an introductory lecture on Böhm, Graz is near the border between Austria and Hungary–which was from the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries before World War I the second country of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy/empire–and the border with Slovenia, formerly part of Yugoslavia, the site of the wars that opened and closed the 20th century. Located in this border zone, Graz presents an ideal vantage point whence to scrutinize the rise and fall of empires and the imperial ambitions of dictators then and now, and to create stories about public and intimate encounters among perpetrators, survivors, and those who would be bystanders of this world-historical turbulence.
Habjan’s remount of Zarwel and Böhm alongside Tranter’s Schicklgrüber as a trio at the Deutsches Theater Berlin reminds audiences in 2025 on the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany that this history matters not only to German-speakers but to all of us in Europe and the world beyond concerned that Nazism, authoritarianism and xenophobic violence–whatever their contemporary disguises—are on the rise again.
* * * * *
Habjan’s was not the only politically inflected puppet theatre on stage in Berlin in mid-2025 but his moving and historically persuasive figures stood out against Tranter’s and a home-grown puppet show Brechts Gespenster [Brecht’s Specters] created by Suse Wächter at the Berliner Ensemble (BE), a house haunted by its most famous star, Bertolt Brecht. Brechts Gespenster presents a revue-style parade of figures impersonating historical personages, sometimes with uncanny accuracy, sometimes less focused, who have had something to say about ghosts, history, political economy, and/or theatre but not necessarily all of the above. Brecht hoped in 1941, when he was still in exile in Finland writing The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, that the rise of Nazism could be resisted but when he and Helene Weigel returned to Berlin in 1948 and took control in 1954 of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, the site of his big hit The Threepenny Opera in 1928-29, he marked the ongoing threat of authoritarianism by having a red X struck across the Prussian eagle that adorned the wall above the boxes nearest the stage (fig.0), and commissioning a new curtain featuring Pablo Picasso’s peace dove. Although master of the house in his time, Brecht was not the first ghost to appear on stage in this show, perhaps because Wächter wanted to address deepening inequality and rapacious capitalism in the Berlin Republic by conjuring Karl Marx and other specters who never set foot in this house but who continue to haunt Europe and the rest of the world.
The show opened and closed with a small rod-puppet Kafka writing to his friend Milena and reflecting in Wächter’s voice on the spectral quality of communicating by letter or telegraph and predicting that technological development will make human beings disappear. Brecht, a jointed puppet in characteristic grey Mao suit and cap (fig.1), was larger than Kafka, about half the size of his animator but big enough to command the stage as he played with the dialectics of absence and presence in the theatre. His last pronouncement Wir leben in gespensterischen Zeiten [we live in spectral times] which blended one of his famous first lines, Wir leben in finsteren Zeiten [we live in dark times] with Marx’s Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa [A specter is haunting Europe], introduced Marx as the master of dialectics and anti-capitalist critique. The puppet’s scruffy beard and threadbare black clothes suited the co-author of The Communist Manifesto whose impatient speed of argument and gesture required the full attention of two puppeteers–Wächter and Mortiz Ilmer—to keep pace. Marx’s harangue was interrupted by God, dressed in white with a beard as wild as Marx’s, throwing dice across the stage as he proclaimed, in the deeper voice of trumpeter Martin Klingeberg, that Einstein was wrong: God does play dice with the universe (fig.2). The argument between Marx and God pitted the atheist who dismissed religion as “opium of the people” against the capricious deity who maintained that taking LSD would enable the faithful to commune with him.
The puppets mimicking historical characters certainly held their own, especially Brecht, Marx, and the surprise guest to this anti-capitalist party, arch-capitalist Friedrich Hayek, who played piano with the hands and voice of pianist Matthias Trippner, mocked communism by singing Brecht’s In Praise of Communism very, very slowly and following this recital with an argument against equality, egalitarianism and solidarity borrowed from his book The Road to Serfdom. But the stars of this show were two gangly rag-and-cloth puppets whose lanky frames and chatterbox skulls required Wächter’s full-body engagement with voice, hands, limbs, head, and trunk all working together to keep each figure going. In keeping with Brechtian estrangement, these two did not replicate but rather quoted their roles: Margaret Thatcher and Manfred Wekwerth. Thatcher had a coiffure that hinted at the Iron Lady’s lacquer helmet and Wächter animated her schoolmarm voice in English supplemented for the local audience with German (a language that the historical Thatcher feared and despised). Whatever the language, Thatcher’s trademark dismissal of solidarity—“there is no such thing as society; there are only individuals” and TINA: there is no alternative to a world dominated by individual owners which had no place for the work-shy–came across loud and clear to a captive audience of proletarians. (fig.3).
Manfred Wekwerth played a dominant role at the BE, which he joined in 1951 when Brecht picked him out of an amateur acting troupe and trained him as a director. After Brecht’s death in 1956, Wekwerth directed at the BE and, although sidelined by Weigel in 1969, returned after her death to take control in 1977 with the support of the Stasi (East German political police), for whom he was a “special collaborator.” He went on to consolidate his power as president of the Academy of Arts and member of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED)’s Central Committee, until the Party, the state, and his rule came to an end in 1990. Although the puppet did not copy Wekwerth’s physical features, his red skull and red leggings made sense as a sign of his loyalty to the SED. Wächter’s voice behind this Wekwerth captured his pedantic style of promulgating Brecht’s theory of estrangement effects. Reminding the audience that the actor was not supposed to imitate Hamlet but to show his character in action, he flourished another skull (Yorick’s, or perhaps Brecht’s?) (fig.4) and recited excerpts from Brecht’s Short Description of a New Technique of Acting at great length until he stretched out languidly on the couch, appearing to smother the puppeteer still holding on to him from behind. The show continued with other sketches, including the line of proles appearing, with the help of trumpet and piano to sing the Solidarity Song from Kuhle Wampe, Brecht and Slatan Dudow’s 1932 film whose subtitle “To Whom does the World Belong?” is timely once again in 2025, as is the film’s depiction of unemployment and housing crises in Berlin, which came up several times in the show. The Solidarity Song also prompted a discussion of the service worker class that has in 21st century Berlin displaced the industrial proletariat, a discussion oddly presented by three garden gnomes, but these did not rise to the level of the earlier scenes that married the topical message with theatrical wit and magic and make the specters speak.
* * * * *
Although Schicklgrüber was the last in the series at the Deutsches Theater in 2025, the show created by Neville Tranter and Jan Veldman first appeared in English in 2003; it was translated into German for this revival. by Habjan and co-puppeteer Manuela Linshalm. The title draws on the fact that Hitler’s father Aloys was born to an unwed mother whose family name was Schicklgrüber and only much later had his birth certificate changed to match his stepfather’s name Hiedler. Apparently, an unnamed bureaucrat wrote Hitler instead, and the rest is history. Mäde’s program notes for the Berlin revival addressed the gravity of this history by pointing to Nazi traces in Berlin, including the former Railway Bunker (fig. 5) (not to be confused with Hitler’s final bunker) built by forced labor a stone’s throw away from the theatre but the show itself favored a cheeky irreverent tone that owed something to Monty Python.
The script played on the family name as a dark joke; the puppeteers saluted the Hitler puppet with “Heil Schicklgrüber” after he complained at the start that he would rather play Joseph Goebbels. Most of the time, the show treated Goebbels, a small toadish head on a legless torso, propelled with Habjan’s arm grasping a single crutch, and Hermann Goering, a fat lout with a pig’s snout, as objects of satire. Talking volubly in Habjan’s voice with a full-throated yappy mouth, Goebbels sounded comical rather than scary but the menace in the puppet’s lizard eyes (fig.6) flamed up when he shut his trap, especially after making credible if unverifiable threats, such as executing the mother of Hitler’s valet Linge (played by Habjan in a black uniform in the style of the SS, but without the death’s head insignia) for allegedly consorting with Jews. The Hitler puppet likewise seemed more sinister glaring in gloomy silence at his cyanide capsule than when he was scolding his co-conspirators (fig.7).
* * * * *
While Wächter and Tranter conjured specters, Habjan created the stories that his crafted figures tell from interviews with living people. For F. Zawrel: Erbbiologisch und sozialminderwertig [Hereditarily and socially undesirable] created by Habjan and directed by Simon Meusburger in 2012, Habjan conducted thirty hours of interviews with the then-unknown 84-year-old Friedrich Zawrel about his experiences as a child abandoned in the 1930s to an orphanage in Vienna called Am Spiegelgrund (Lookingglass Ground). The name of the place seems in retrospect a creepy allusion to the cruel experiments inflicted on the children there by the Nazi Dr. Heinrich Gross. In the flashback scenes, Habjan played the doctor in white coat and mask manipulating his young charges, including the young Zawrel; the twisted limbs of the inert puppets suggested not repose but the harm done to the children (fig. 8). Habjan also drew from Zawrel’s encounter with Gross in 1975, when Gross was a prison doctor and Zawrel, deprived of education as a child in Gross’s custody, had been surviving by petty theft, a prisoner. When Zawrel attempted to denounce Gross who had suffered nothing for his crimes, the doctor certified him a born criminal using the Nazi jargon reproduced in the title; Zawrel was freed only in the 1980s. Habjan uses their clothing to highlight the doctor’s intact social status vis-à-vis the plebeian prisoner Zawrel (fig.9).
In contrast to the humble Zawrel, Karl Böhm, famous conductor, Graz native son, and the subject of Habjan’s next piece on the Nazi legacy, was an imperious and ambitious man. Böhm died in 1981, before Habjan’s birth in 1987, but he left a paper trail of letters and public statements that demonstrated his support for the Nazi project of “Aryanizing” German culture, even if he was never a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), and even if, as Habjan points out in the program notes, collaborator Viennese playwright/psychiatrist Paulus Hochgatterer created “an unstable character” whose memories appeared to be unreliable.[2] Habjan drew on his knowledge as a director of music theatre of Böhm’s significant contribution to the operatic and classical repertoire in recordings as well as major performances. He animated eleven puppets and voiced all characters, except for operatic recordings which accompanied the graceful figures of singers such as Elisabeth Schwartzkopf or Christa Ludwig. In his primary role as a nurse responsible for the wheelchair-bound patient, Habjan honored Böhm’s career by playing his records in the nursing-home room. At the same time, he animated Böhm as a curmudgeon complaining that the younger sister of his caregiver (fig.10),knew nothing of the classical repertoire—no Schubert, no Mozart, no Beethoven—but she could recognize kitsch movie excerpts of Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer. Böhm apparently had to play more Wagner during the Nazi era than the composers he preferred, such as Mozart and Schubert, but he also favored a composer who flirted with the Nazis, his “personal friend” Richard Strauss. Habjan had Böhm speak with a marked Viennese accent, an accent that–even though Böhm was neither Jewish nor a friend, which he pronounced like the Yiddish Fraynd as against standard German Freund, to Jewish colleagues–was historically influenced by the many Yiddish-speakers who migrated to Vienna in centuries past from Galicia and other corners of the empire.[3]
Alternating with the scenes in the nursing home, Habjan staged key moments in Böhm’s career and the history of Austria and Germany. When Böhm was tapped to take over the Semper Opera in Dresden in 1934 after Fritz Busch was ousted for refusing to fire Jewish musicians, Habjan highlighted the Nazi takeover by animating Busch as a small table-top conductor confronting a much bigger Nazi functionary. In the 1938 scene, as newsreel footage showed Hitler’s march into Vienna, Habjan manipulated with his right hand a younger Böhm planning the concert to celebrate Germany’s annexation of Austria, while he played in the flesh the first violinist holding his instrument in his left (fig. 11). Their dialog highlighted Böhm’s contradictory behavior: on one hand he resisted the idea of showing Hitler “childish solidarity” by playing his favorite music but on the other agreed to open the program with Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles and ignored his companion’s anxious references to escalating violence against Jews in Austria and Germany.
At the end of World War II in 1945, the Allied Command dismissed Böhm from his position at the Vienna Opera on evidence of his explicit support for Nazi rule. This support resurfaced in the play in one of several recollections in the nursing home when Habjan had Böhm repeat a notorious statement celebrating Austria’s annexation in 1938 in which he linked the successful annexation with Hitler’s attempted putsch in Munich in 1923, calling this apparent failure “a landmark event in German history” when “we saw the blood that would be shed for the idea” that “triumphed” in 1938. When the Allied occupation ended in 1955, Böhm returned to conduct the Vienna Opera, even though locals became increasingly unhappy with his performance. In the 1956 scene, Habjan played a journalist channeling this discontent, as he queried an older but still vigorous Böhm, who played the peripatetic star conductor well before this became the norm,about his frequent absences from Vienna. He was finally ousted only after a disastrous performance in 1968, when he was booed off the stage. In these scenes, Habjan and Hochgatterer acknowledge that Böhm supported the Nazis when it suited him, joining the Battle League (Kampfbund) of German Artists, even if he disdained Nazi kitsch, but in the final scene they pulled back from judgment. Whereas Salzburg Festival organizers decided belatedly in 2014 to put a plaque on the hall named after Böhm to celebrate his artistic achievements while “regretting” that “his politics were fatally mistaken,” the last scene of this play, after the curtain at the back of the nursing-home room had risen to reveal the full stage, scattered with overturned chairs, left his legacy ambiguous. Some in the Berlin audience might have seen in these chairs a way of acknowledging the absent presence of Jewish Austrians forcibly deported, as The Abandoned Room, a memorial sculpture of an abandoned table and overturned chair (1996), did for Jewish Berliners, but Habjan carried Böhm without comment right past the chairs. On reaching a plinth far upstage topped with a bust of Böhm, he lifted his patient up high enough to touch his likeness but, instead of embracing it, he knocked it down–and there this play ended, leaving, as the creators evidently intended, the contradictions of this character and his legacy unresolved.
Coda
While Brechts Gespenster strikes topical notes as its figures comment on 21st century capitalism and housing and employment precarity in the Berlin Republic, the Deutsches Theater program notes do not invite audiences to draw immediate conclusions about the legacy of Nazi violence whether on a global, national, or intimate scale. Nonetheless, the Nazi past and the current resurgence of xenophobic and white supremacist violence are hard to avoid in Berlin. The massive monuments in the center of Berlin and more modest Stolpersteine (commemorative stumbling stones) outside many apartment buildings in Schöneberg, where I was staying on this occasion, recall the dead, and news commentary on rising hostility to people who look or think differently highlight the peril to the living.
An exhibition hidden away in one of Berlin’s central museums speaks to these contradictions. Although not obviously a performance, this exhibition dedicated to the angel provides an apt coda to this performance review. In mid-2025, the Bode Museum, opened in 1904 and named later for Wilhelm Bode, cosmopolitan art collector and avowed anti-Semite, unveiled a small exhibition called The Angel of History. This exhibition, which required visitors follow a circuitous route through the museum café on a performative quest for the angel, featured not only Paul Klee’s famous Angelus Novus and Walter Benjamin’s comments on his favorite print in the ninth thesis of his essay On the Concept of History, but also older works from the collection including an etching by Albrecht Dürer, a copy of which Benjamin also owned, and a sixteenth-century sculpture of a kneeling angel by Andrea Bregno that was damaged by bombing at the end of World War II.
If the presence of the last work in this exhibition carries a hint of reproach against the Allies, Benjamin’s opening thesis to his essay, written in 1940 months before his suicide, repudiates any special pleading: “To articulate the past historically [ . . .] means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger”—inspired the exhibition’s call to look at the future as well as the past and calls readers to reclaim knowledge of the past to combat present and future danger.[4] By conceiving of memory as a form of active resistance against danger and resignation, this first thesis anticipates and also corrects the ninth in which Benjamin reads Klee’s picture as the angel’s confrontation with the past and the catastrophe piling up in front of him while the storm propels him into the future. While in the ninth thesis, Benjamin calls this storm “progress,” his first thesis does not take progress for granted but rather calls for action in the face of danger, to seize the past from the hands of those who would dismember it, remember and restore the history of struggle and so to create a future in solidarity.
Endnotes
[1] See my comments on Bread and Puppet’s version of Aeschylus’s Persians in Kruger 513-17.
[2] Nikolaus Habjan in conversation with Elisabeth Geyer, program for Böhm by Paulus Hochgatterer.
[3] The Yiddish elements in Viennese dialect add irony to Austrian amnesia of the population’s historical enthusiasm for acts of terror against Jewish citizens, which began within days of the Nazi annexation. The nuances of these elements and the puppet styles apparently escaped the New York Times reviewer; see Goldman.
[4] See Benjamin; also the exhibition guide Der Engel der Geschichte.
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1968, p. 255. Originally published as “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1.2, Suhrkamp, 1980, p. 695.
Goldman, A. J. “A Great One-Man Show is Rare.” The New York Times, 22 Feb. 2019.
Habjan, Nikolaus. F. Zawrel: erbbiologisch belastet und sozialminderwertig: Critics’ commentary.
Habjan, Nikolaus, and Elisabeth Geyer. “Program: Böhm by Paulus Hochgatterer.” Deutsches Theater, Berlin, 2024.
Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin Books, 2005.
Kruger, Loren. “Fourth Chicago International Puppet Theatre Festival.” Theatre Journal, vol. 74, no. 4, 2022, pp. 513–17.
“Engel: ein Blick in die Vergangenheit und die Zukunft [Angel: A Glance into the Past and the Future].” Der Engel der Geschichte [The Angel of History], curated exhibition guide, Bode Museum, Berlin, 29 May 2025.
*Loren Kruger is professor emerita in Comparative Literature and Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. Among her several books, the most relevant to this publication are Post-Imperial Brecht (Cambridge 2004), winner of the Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Study awarded by the Modern Language Association, and Beyond the Internationale: Revolutionary Writing by Eugène Pottier, Communard (Charles H. Kerr, 2024). Recent articles include: “Brecht and the Glocal South,” UNITAS 95 (2022), “Performance and Politics in and out of Time: American Responses to the Paris Commune,” PAMIETNIK TEATRALNY70: 4 (2021); and a review of the Fourth Chicago International Puppet Festival, Theatre Journal 74 (2022).
Copyright © 2025 Loren Kruger
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #31, June 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
