Doll collection of the Ernst Busch University: Does the name Schicklgruber mean anything to you?

Puppetry ?" asks my neighbor when I tell her about my destination at the mailbox, "isn't that ... more for children?" An hour later, I pass the question on to a student who is training to be a puppeteer at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Together with a lecturer, he guides interested people like me once a month through the university's collection of puppets and masks, which has been growing steadily for forty years. "Puppet theater," the student replies, "is more than the Augsburger Puppenkiste and Punch and Judy show, even if that's what everyone knows first. This one, for example," he says, putting on a face mask contorted in pain, "isn't feeling well. But if something incredibly beautiful happens to him - how do I portray it? Because this," he taps the tortured mask face, "can't change. So how do I organize my body so that this character can also experience a wonderful moment?!"

The students learn this in a subject "that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world: puppet handling techniques. At the beginning, before you even have a puppet in your hand, you just hold your hands up for months and see: How long can I hold out up here? After a minute, my arms are already getting heavy. And my hand: What joints are there?"

We participants do the same and explore our hand and finger bones, moving each limb individually. "Even at concerts," says a girl next to me, "I can barely manage to swing my arms for an entire song." "And how did you come up with the idea of ​​studying puppetry?" I ask, not even knowing that such a course existed until a few weeks ago.

Many applicants, the lecturer explains, are already older, with previous experience in the visual arts or stage sculpture. "We challenge the students to be artistic authors themselves. In other words, to develop something themselves, to write texts themselves, not so much this primacy of the dramatic text."

This is followed by a question that has been on my mind since the beginning of the tour: "And what do you do with it then?" "More than half of our graduates go into an ensemble. With the exception of Koblenz and Gelsenkirchen, these are all theaters in the East." You have to make a clear distinction between the "new" and the "old" federal states: "In the "new" federal states there are a lot of municipal puppet theaters: Halle, Bautzen, Chemnitz, Gera, Dresden. This has to do with cultural policy. Cities had puppet theaters. After the fall of the Wall, many were then transferred to other organizational forms. Does anyone here come from the East?"

Silence. I shake my head. "And have any of you ever seen a puppet show?" Silence again. I shake my head again, hardly daring to look at the two enthusiastic puppeteers. "But Lars Eidinger ," says one of the participants, "I've seen him on stage before. He's from here too."

"Where in Berlin are there puppet theaters?" asks the girl with sore arm muscles. "Isn't that... quite a niche? And also... well... on the decline?!" "NOOOOO!" protests the cheeky blonde puppet in the student's hand. His professor answers diplomatically: "In the Schaubude on Greifswalder Strasse in Prenzlauer Berg. And in May, Nikolaus Habjan , an Austrian puppeteer, will be performing at the Deutsches Theater again. "His play is called Schicklgruber," adds the lecturer, as he shows us Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos' incredibly inhuman puppet heads. "Does that name mean anything to you?"