This exhibit at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism is a little tricky to photograph because of the light, but it’s an important part of their current exhibition. The puppet is Chanele, created by the Munich Puppet Theatre of Jewish Artists which was in existence between 1934 and 1937 when it performed five plays and three musical dramas.
The central person featured by the museum is Maria Luiko (1904-1941) who was a founding member of the theatre group and she made the puppets and most of the stage sets, so she was likely the first person to pull the strings of Chanele. Maria was unable to join the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts when it was created in 1933 as she was Jewish, which also meant that she couldn’t display or sell any of her works. Maria had ideally wanted to move to Palestine, but she was arrested and deported on 20 November 1941, along with her sister Dr. Elisabeth Kohn and her mother Olga Kohn (nee Schulhöfer), from Munich to Kaunas in 1941 and she was then murdered on 25 November 1941. These murders became known as the Ninth Fort massacres, the first systematic mass killings of German Jews during the Second World War.
The museum notes:
“Chanele still remembers what it was like to move on the stage, to tell her story, to play a role. She remembers the excitement and the applause, the hands that made her and the held her on the stage. The hands of the people who believed in the magic of theatre and the power of stories to transform, to comfort, to hold people together.”
The puppet’s survival feels a little remarkable, but its existence means that the story of Maria Luiko is at least not lost to history.