The Marionetten Werkstatt celebrates its 30th anniversary

More than three decades ago the first marionettes were made for friends and relatives or ordered by them. It was the beginning of first commercial orders, done at home and later in my first little shop in Bielefeld. For 20 years now the MarionettenWerkstatt calls the Breite Strasse its home.

During my first years in college, studying graphic design, it became clear to me that my interest and strength lays within 3-dimensional creativity. Working with all kinds of materials like wood, plaster, clay, pasteboard, paint and cloth was fascinating to me right from the beginning. Building marionettes was the ideal way to be 3-dimensional creative, to work with those materials at hand and to legitimize the collector’s mania for everything that could be used as a marionette’s accessory.

The first puppets looked rather simple in comparison to the state of art. The faces were rough, the clothes put together from what was found at the swap meet, the hands seemed bully without separately formed fingers. Nevertheless those first and unprofessional models had their charm – and I had lots of fun.

At one point the amount of cloths, paint, sculptural paste and wood were beyond the scope of my household and it had to be my own atelier. More and more the hobby became a profession and the studying became secondary. The birth of my children strengthened my decision to concentrate on the MarionettenWerkstatt.

Within the next years my work developed – thanks to ideas and suggestions of my customers. Their special requests and portrait marionettes became part of my repertoire, while I developed a method to copy faces perfectly. This relief in the working process made it possible to offer marionettes created with a lot of hours to a fair price.

After I have changed the location twice the MarionetteWerkstatt’s home is now the Breite Strasse 33, in the inner city of Bielefeld for about 20 years.
With the years a lot of new ideas came along, like hand puppets and puppets an stabs, egg warmer, sitting puppets, but also reseller products like other hand puppets and woodwork and everything else that you would expect in such a lovely atelier.