“Potz Holzöpfel and Zipfelchappe”

The puppeteer Adalbert Klingler introduced his Kasperli puppet show in 1947 for the first time at Zurich’s Migros club house. Shortly thereafter, he set up his own puppet theatre in Park im Grüene . The Kasperli puppet shows are one of the main attractions to this day.

The audience’s reactions to the first Migros puppet show were described in a 1947 edition of the Migros magazine, Wir Brückenbauer : «Boys were clenching their fists, girls were close to tears – the hall resounded with protests, warnings and shouts of encouragement...». The enthusiasm was so great that the Migros puppeteer Adalbert Klingler went on tour the regional cooperatives and ultimately built his own theatre in Rüschlikon’s Park im Grüene .

Klingler’s characters are distinctive and often so frightening that a concerned mother was worried for her childrens’ souls. Gottlieb Duttweiler stepped in, calling upon an expert in the matter – a developmental psychologist, who decided that the devil and grandmother should be omitted in future, as well as the main character Kasper’s «silliness» and «bawdy brawls» that «would only provoke brutal instincts». At the same time, however, he stressed that this character, equivalent to Punch in the Punch and Judy puppet shows, was an «age-old symbol», an «ever-lasting figure that could neither be prohibited, nor slandered».” And so it came to be that the Kasperli plays in Park im Grüene have delighted – and sometimes even somewhat frightened – generations of children to this very day.