For centuries Kasperle, a long-nosed marionette with the virtues of Galahad and the deportment of Mortimer Snerd, has been muddling his way to victory over the villains of Germany's popular puppet dramas. Last week at a Berlin congress of 400 East German puppeteers, Professor Sergei Obraslov, director of Moscow's State Central Puppet Theater, explained the changed duties of Kasperle and other puppet characters in a Soviet state.
Kasperle's new model should be his Russian cousin Petrushka. The Bolsheviks first banished Petrushka from the Russian puppet stage, as "an outdated anarchist figure." After the building of the Soviet state, Obraslov said, Puppet Petrushka...
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