When Puppets Take to the Streets
- Johana Trejtnar
- 15 hours ago
- 8 min read
By Johana Trejtnar
Two years ago I readied myself for an interview for university, where I had applied to the politics department. I expected the examiners to ask me about democracy, about social policy, about activism. I was surprised when they focused on something I had mentioned as an afterthought: the political dimensions of puppet theater. This was a topic I knew well. Czech political history is full of puppets.
At Puppets in Prague workshops, our international students often ask about the role of Czech puppets in resisting oppressive regimes: the Habsburgs, the Nazis, the Communists. These questions often allude to the trope of the oppressed artist unable to express their opinions directly. Beaten-down, the artist reverts to using puppets as a symbol for the state’s injustices.
The real place of Czech puppetry in resistance is more complicated. Throughout the past, puppets played a nuanced role: as language-bearers and nationalist symbols under the Austo-Hungarian empire, as victims of censure under the Nazis.
Puppets as a direct symbolic attack of those in power only really emerged in the last thirty years, when puppets have become customary attendees of protest marches.
Political puppetry: the beginnings
Puppetry has been tied to politics in the Czech lands for at least 400 years. Before returning to the roots of puppet resistance, I must take you on a short excursion through the historical circumstances of the 1600s.
When the Austrian Habsburg king won over Czech armies at the battle of the White Mountain in 1620, he seized the Czech lands for the next 200 years. To avenge the Czechs for their resistance and to rid himself of future enemies, the Austrian monarch proclaimed that all must adhere to the Catholic faith. Czechs, who at that time were primarily Protestant, were given the choice to convert or leave.
For the lower strata of society, this was not really a choice. Lacking the means to leave the country, most converted. For the Czech Protestant elites, however, it was another story. Being scared for their faith, but also, more importantly, their life, they fled the country in a mass exodus.
Initially, they started Czech societies abroad, hoping to eventually return to the country. As Habsburg rule solidified, their hopes slowly dissipated, leaving the Czech elites stranded abroad and the Czech lands in the hands of German elites.
It’s all about the language
In an attempt to unify their lands, the Habsburgs enforced not only compulsory Catholicism, but also German as the universal language. By the early 19th century, Czech cities were almost fully German and the Czech language became the old-fashioned property of the rural lower class. From state administration to universities, everything was in German – everything, including theater.
Over the next 200 years, the Czech language was nearly lost. It was only when a Europe-wide wave of nationalism swept over the Czech lands in the early 19th century that Czechs started rediscovering their language and culture. Because so few people had used Czech as an official language for such a long time, it was in shambles, infested with German phrases, altered to suit the village pub, where the language was most commonly heard. Many considered it a miracle that the language had survived at all.
Puppeteers, the heroes of the nation
While grand productions of Mozart’s operas were staged in German in Prague, another type of theater gained prevalence in the countryside: travelling puppeteers, who were incredibly popular all over the Czech lands. Throughout the eras of increasing Germanification, puppeteers hitched their carriages carrying wooden characters and props. They travelled from village to village, producing plays in a language the masses would understand – Czech.
Puppeteers did not use puppets to directly attack the Austro-Hungarian emperor, and most of them also performed in German depending on the audience. However, they became an instrumental tool to the emperor’s fall.
Puppetry became one of the symbols of the “National awakening”, which emerged in the 19th century. Czech intellectuals and artists pushed back against Austrian overrule, strengthening national sentiment in the Czechs, and weakening the power of Vienna.
Eventually, this resurgent nationalism paved the way to an independent Czechoslovakia. Marionettes came to symbolize the preservation of Czech-ness, the prevailing of culture, and stubborn resistance in the face of hostility.
In 1918, Czechoslovakia was founded and puppets became a symbol of its freshly-established national identity. The first Czechoslovak president hung a marionette in his office in the Prague Castle, and puppeteers performed shows for soldiers with iconic Czech characters to bolster their patriotism. Czech manufacturers produced hugely popular family puppet theatres decorated with Czech symbols and slogans so Czech families could perform their own patriotic shows at home.
Puppet prison: From Austrian resistance to Nazi prison
Josef Skupa, a puppeteer from Pilsen, rode on the wave of this puppet enthusiasm.
Skupa studied illustration at the Decorative Arts Academy in Prague in 1913 and as a student he regularly attended popular anti-Austrian cabarets. He created parodies of the Austrian Empire, and in 1918, his own Kasparek character (the iconic puppet symbolic of Czech puppetry) buried the Austrian Empire in a satire to mark the birth of Czechoslovakia.
A few years later, he designed his own now-iconic character Spejbl, who was the star of his increasingly popular cabarets, and later added Hurvinek, The two characters appeared on the radio, in books, on gramophones. They also performed at the first UNIMA meeting in the 1920s.
In 1937 he engaged in political commentary against the Nazi regime, and he was closely followed after the Munich agreement in 1938. When the Nazis marched into Prague in 1939, initially little changed for Skupa. However, two years later, the first informers complained to the Nazis about the theater: its plays were not in line with Nazi propaganda.
By 1943, informers started complaining about the theater with increasing regularity. As one Nazi agent wrote:
"Czechs who show friendship towards Germans repeatedly point out that such performances destroy more than can be built up in a whole year of work to educate the Czech people in the Reich's way of thinking."
In January 1944, the Nazis arrested and imprisoned Skupa and his wife, and the theater was closed. Skupa was imprisoned in a concentration camp in Dresden until 1945. But not only that – during a home inspection the gestapo retrieved the two puppets of the popular characters and put them in “prison” as well, locking them in a safe in the Pilsen police station, not to be seen until the end of the war.
Skupa survived the war, as did his puppets, and he revived his famed theater in 1945 in Prague, where they perform to this day.
Dissident puppets? Not really
Under Communism, puppets never became a target of oppression or the subjects of resistance. While the Communist era started with a blow to puppeteers: the banning of travelling puppet theaters because they were private businesses, in other ways, the forty-year era contributed to the development of puppetry.
The nature of puppetry changed and became centralised. Modelled on the Moscow Puppet Theatre of Sergei Obraztsov, in the 1950s-60s the Communist regime established a network of puppet theatres intended to promote socialist ideas. They also established the puppetry department at the theater academy in Prague, graduating a dozen professional puppet-makers and performers each year. Each major city in Czechoslovakia had a puppet theatre, giving the puppeteers stable employment after their university studies. All productions were censored, and artists in the state-controlled companies had to adhere to certain criteria of the state.
If puppeteers were willing to at least pretend to agree to certain doctrines (and if they did not come from a family deemed inappropriate by the state), these newly-developing professional companies with inordinate amounts of institution support often provided a flourishing artistic community. Several companies, such as the world-famous DRAK theatre, were allowed to attend international festivals around the world. This gave puppeteers in these companies the unusual chance to travel to the west, and they had little incentive to garner open political protest themselves. This was true until 1989, when the theater academy became the centerpoint of student protests against the regime, something puppetry students partook in and many of them led. But even then, puppets themselves stayed out of the picture.
Putin, Trump. The puppet as a metaphor
Over the past thirty years, more artists have turned to puppets as metaphors for politics.
One of the best known examples is an annual march on the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, organized by the nonprofit organization Sametové pocvíceni (Velvet Carnival). Artists, activist groups, and schools use puppets and masks to satirise the current political climate. This year, the march included a prop windmill to symbolise the Don Quichotian fight against the currents of the overwhelming digital world. Traditionally, the march also includes puppets of politicians and satires of political events.
It is not unusual to see puppets at protests. At a recent demonstration against the appointment of members of the right wing Motorist party to the ministry of environmental affairs, students made larger than life paper maché depictions of the politicians.
In a similar vein, at our Puppets in Prague workshop, we created large Putin and Trump puppets for the 2016 Women' s March against Trump in his first term in office. This past summer, we made a puppet of Putin with depictions of various Russian-owned properties in Prague to protest the reach of the Russian oligarchy in the city.
The trend to use puppets as satirical, metaphorical depictions in the Czech cultural sphere is accompanied by a rise in political puppet shows, where artists use puppets to deliver on strong political messages. A striking example of this is the Lisen Theatre which has created shows about houselessness and the Russian murder of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Recently students at the Prague Theatre Academy used animal puppets to highlight the environmental consequences of our anthropocentric view of the world.
A legacy of puppet resistance
In a way, the contemporary Czech puppet landscape fulfills the trope of the artist, using puppets to directly protest politics, more often than any previous time. The lesson to draw, I suppose, is that art mirrors the times and, even when not directly aimed against the state in sweeping satire, artists’ resistance can have long-lasting consequences. From the act of performing in Czech under the Austro-Hungarian empire to that of performing at all under the Nazis, puppet resistance has formed the Czech nation and state. And these past forms of resistance have paved the way for the strong, satirical messages, which artists pack into their puppets and masks today.
Johana Trejtnar has grown up surrounded by puppets and made her first marionette at age 10. She now studies politics at Cambridge University and teaches woodcarving, painting and Czech puppet history at Puppets in Prague workshops
Amazing article! Thank you Johana. I am definitely returning in 2027. I am working on my play, Revolutions Per Minute, and want to make more puppets for it. I am reading The Pupppe and the Modern. I would love to read more of your writing. Perhaps I can meet you at the workshop in 2027. Thank you again. In solidarity!!!
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