German marionettist and director. Georg Deininger gave up his job as a dentist in 1922 to devote himself to the marionette theatre he had founded two years earlier. In 1925, he opened the Stuttgarter Künstler-Marionetten-Theater (Stuttgart Artist Marionette Theatre). He saw himself as a “conservative innovator” and treated the string puppet like a seemingly alive, acting miniature person which was to give an almost perfect illusion on stage. To this end he began directing comedies as well as fairy tales, legends and regional stories in a style of realism based on history. These were indeed intended as descriptive lessons in “German history and education” and should in no way be taken as pure entertainment. The artistic and ideological beliefs of Georg Deininger corresponded with the maxims of the National Socialist cultural policy.

(See Germany.)