The toy theater characters were donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2016 by the Katz family.
The Katz Ehrenthal Collection is a collection of more than 900 objects depicting Jews and antisemitic and anti-Jewish propaganda from the medieval to the modern era, in Europe, Russia, and the United States. The collection was amassed by Peter Ehrenthal, a Romanian Holocaust survivor, to document the pervasive history of anti-Jewish hatred in Western art, politics and popular culture. It includes crude folk art as well as pieces created by Europe's finest craftsmen, prints and periodical illustrations, posters, paintings, decorative art, and toys and everyday household items decorated with depictions of stereotypical Jewish figures.
Offset color lithograph in black ink on paper with the title in German in Fraktur font at the top center, with 15 captioned characters from a fairy tale standing on grass arranged in 2 rows: 6 above and 9 below. The human characters wear distinctive costumes and are depicted with the heads and tails of chickens or roosters, except for the bearded Jewish man with an exaggeratedly large nose resembling a beak. In the top row, 3 characters, a man, his wife, and their daughter, are each depicted twice: first in the plain clothing of farmers and then in the elaborate clothing of the wealthy. In the bottom row, from the left, there is a prince holding a sword, a king bearing a crown, scepter, and orb, the Jew in a long coat, a peasant man with feathered arms, a peasant woman holding a basket, a doll, and 2 clothed mice above a cat. Publication information is printed in the bottom right corner.
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overall: Height: 14.125 inches (35.878 cm) | Width: 16.875 inches (42.863 cm)
Colored print of paper theater characters from Gockel, Hinkel und Gackeleia, a comic play based on a German fairy tale, printed in the 1920s by J.F. Schreiber, a publishing house in Esslingen, Germany. The story, written by Clemens Brentano in the early 1800s, revolves around the title characters, a chicken master and his family, being banished from the king’s court, living in poverty, and using a magic ring to improve their situation. During the 1800s, paper theaters were popular toys for children and collector’s pieces for adults. Publishers produced simplified performance scripts for plays and printed sheets bearing multiple characters in a variety of costumes and a range of scenery for use in a toy theater. The individual characters, each identified by name, and the set-pieces were spaced far enough apart to be cut out and mounted on stiff paperboard so that they would stand freely during the reenactment of a play.
Print from a play theater kit of characters from a fairy tale