History
From an early age Max Jacob had been involved with the Wandervogel movement and was very interested in folk arts and folk traditions. When, in 1921, he saw a puppet show for the first time, he purchased his own puppets and gave a performance to an audience mostly made up of other friends of the Wandervogel movement.
Wandervogel is the name adopted by a popular movement of German youth groups from 1896 onward. The name can be translated as rambling, hiking, or wandering bird and the ethos is to shake off the restrictions of society and get back to nature and freedom. Soon the groups split and they originated ever more organisations, which still all called themselves Wandervogel, but were organisationally independent. Nonetheless the feeling was still of being a common movement, but split into several branches.
After this, he set up the Hartensteiner Puppenspiele, which was renamed Hohensteiner Puppenspiele when Jacob and many of his troupe moved to Hohnsteiner Castle in 1928, where they lived and worked together. Many audience members were also guests at the castle, which functioned not only as the troupe's home, but as a youth hostel. The troupe, as well as craftsmen and -women involved in the construction of the puppets and the staging, began to transform the style of the Kasper theatre, changing it from a fairground show, with an emphasis on slapstick humour and irreverent anti-authoritarianism, into a theatrical art with a pedagogical purpose. Jacob explained of Kasper that "Er tut das Moralische rein vorbildlich, er moralisiert aber nicht. Und dieses Vorbild nehmen die Kinder in sich auf" (He does what is moral simply by example, but he does not moralise. And the children internalise this example). [1]
A fair, also known as a funfair, is a gathering of people for a variety of entertainment or commercial activities. It is normally of the essence of a fair that it is temporary with scheduled times lasting from an afternoon to several weeks.
Slapstick is a style of humor involving exaggerated physical activity which exceeds the boundaries of normal physical comedy. The term arises from a device developed during the broad, physical comedy style known as Commedia dell'arte in 16th Century Italy. The "slap stick" consists of two thin slats of wood, which make a 'slap' when striking another actor, with little force needed to make a loud—and comical—sound. The physical slap stick remains a key component of the plot in the traditional and popular Punch and Judy puppet show.
In 1933, the troupe had to leave the Hohnsteiner Castle because the Nazis had taken it over and turned it into a concentration camp. The troupe moved to a multi-family house, where they again lived and performed. The house became known as the Kasperhaus, and the troupe reconstructed it at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (1937) (more notorious for the other showpiece from Nazi Germany by Albert Speer). They were awarded a Gold Medal. After this, the troupe began to make international tours, and to produce Kasper in different media (film, particularly short film, television, even radio).
Nazi Germany is the common English name for Germany between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party (NSDAP) controlled the country through a dictatorship. Under Hitler's rule, Germany was transformed into a totalitarian state that controlled nearly all aspects of life via the Gleichschaltung legal process. The official name of the state was Deutsches Reich until 1943 and Großdeutsches Reich from 1943 to 1945. Nazi Germany is also known as the Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", the first two being the Holy Roman Empire (800–1806) and the German Empire (1871–1918). The Nazi regime ended after the Allies defeated Germany in May 1945, ending World War II in Europe.
Albert Speer was the Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany during most of World War II. A close ally of Adolf Hitler, he was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
A short film is any motion picture not long enough to be considered a feature film. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences defines a short film as "an original motion picture that has a running time of 40 minutes or less, including all credits". In the United States, short films were generally termed short subjects from the 1920s into the 1970s when confined to two 35mm reels or less, and featurettes for a film of three or four reels. "Short" was an abbreviation for either term.
During the 1940s, the Hohnsteiner Puppenspiele entertained the troops, and functioned as the showpiece puppet theatre during the Nazi era.
Many of Jacob's original troupe were killed in the war, or had left the troupe, so after the war Jacob and the remaining members – as well as some new additions such as the composer Irmgard Wassmann - began afresh with the Hohnsteiner Theatre in Hamburg. During this post-war period, the troupe gave performances in prisoner of war camps, detention centres, and convalescent homes for former concentration camp inmates, and orphanages.
Hamburg is the second-largest city in Germany with a population of over 1.8 million.
Jacob retired from the puppet theatre in 1953 but remained close to the theatre until his death in 1967. In this time he attended conferences and seminars and in 1957 was selected as president of the international puppeteers association, UNIMA. He held this position until his death.
Puppeteers such as Friedrich Arndt, Harald Schwarz and Erich Kürschner continued the legacy of Jacob and the Hohnsteiner Puppenspiele.
Style
Max Jacob's Hohnsteiner Kasper differed from the earlier fairground Kasper in its moral intention to instil "values" into its younger audience members, and in its self-definition as a theatre form rather than a fairground entertainment. In contrast to the fairground Kasper, which had borrowed from the British Punch and Judy stories that showed Punch throwing his crying baby out the window, beating his wife, as well as an array of authority figures, Jacob's Kasper was more childlike in character, as well as being wiser and on friendly terms with the policeman (Wachtmeister). Along with the slapstick element, Jacob's troupe removed bawdiness and smutty language.
The Hohensteiner Kasper Theatre relied less on props and scenery than the earlier Kasper Theatre and instead used an assortment of curtains behind the figures. They also played in a room rather than on the traditional Spielleiste. They also introduced music to Kasper theatre, provided above all by one of the Hohnsteiner troupe's later additions, the composer Irmgard Wesemann, who joined them in 1945. The music gave a prominent place to the accordion, which would be played from behind the stage while Kasper himself mimed a mini-performance.
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