In October 1863, an ancestor on my mother’s side attended a puppet show of Faust. My mother found this poster (below) among my grandmother’s things after she passed in 1982 and has had it on the wall for years. It’s a really cool historical artifact, but unfortunately, it contains no information about who the puppet company was, or even what city it was in. And Faust was such a popular story at the time, every puppet company in the German-speaking world was doing it!
Well, I started doing some research, and I’m happy to say that I’ve found the answer. The show was in Munich, and it was performed by the Münchner Marionettentheater, which is still in existence today!
The Münchner Marionettentheater was founded in 1858 by Josef Leonhard Schmid (pictured above in 1898 with his Casperl puppet). It bounced around the city for a while (it was on Arcostraße for a year) and eventually found a permanent home in 1900, where it remains to this day.
I was pretty sure I had it right, so I emailed the Münchner Marionettentheater an image of the poster to ask whether it was them. And they confirmed that it was!
They also confirmed that the version of Faust they presented was the one recorded by Karl Joseph Simrock in 1846 (but significantly older than that), which is available to read (in German, of course) on Internet Archive, and also here on Zeno.org, where it is more readily machine-translated into English. Above is a joke from the play that made me chuckle, even in translation 200 years later. (They put Casperle, the German equivalent of Mr. Punch, into the play for comic relief.)
I was even able to find images of some of the puppets from the play, in the online collection of the Münchner Stadtmuseum. Above you can see a devil in yellow dress, and a police Corporal/city drummer. Below are a stork, and a painted backdrop of a landscape with a fisherman’s hut. Many (all?) of these were created by Karl Wilhelm von Heideck, and the dates are correct for them all to have been used in that very performance.
At the time of the performance, Munich was the capital of the still-independent Kingdom of Bavaria, ruled by Maximilian II. It would join the German Empire (under Otto von Bismarck) 8 years later. The railways had reached Munich 24 years earlier; electric lighting would come 19 years later. Elsewhere, the American Civil War was going on; the Emancipation Proclamation and the Battle of Gettysburg happened earlier that same year. And of course, Canadian Confederation would follow four years later. It was also the same decade as the invention of dynamite, Maxwell’s equations, Mendelian inheritance, the periodic table, and Pasteurization; the modern world was taking shape.
By the way: the person who emailed me back from the Münchner Marionettentheater was Siegfried Böhmke, the director of the theater — and he was also the puppeteer of Uncle Traveling Matt for the German segments. Somehow it all comes back to Fraggles.
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