Hanswurst von Salzburg mit dem hölzernen Gat is a satire of the Sturm und Drang generation, and of the notion of “genius”. Johann Friedrich Schink considered that it was used to expediently justify all sorts of depravities: the Sturm und Drang movement was indeed known for bringing social violence on the stage, along with its rebel criminals, perverted children and abused girls. Schink’s puppet theatre uses an outrageous register to parody the tropes of this kind of literature (the hanging scene in the forest, in the middle of a tempest), which it also heightens (Hanswurst’ newborn daughter offers to recite The Sorrows of Young Werther, which she has read in her mother’s womb). The author justifies his work by mentioning the “geniuses” of his time: he most particularly targets Goethe, who was only a few years older than he was, but also his more or less talented imitators. For Schink, puppet theatre is above all a form of expression concerned with trivial, obscene and even scatological themes. It seems that he was not intending for his play to be performed: its length was enough to deter puppeteers from staging it. The prompter’s appearance at the end, who comes out of his hole to deplore that such a play was written in the first place, is more reminiscent of actors’ theatre. The label “puppet theatre” would then signal the satirical and parodic intent behind the play, in the manner of Siegfried August Mahlmann, who used the label to reassert the value of less serious dramatic forms, against the pompous theatre of bourgeois circles.

Hanswurst is thrown out like trash from the stage of the Berlin theatre following the success of Voltaire’s tragedy Alzire. He is exiled to Salzbourg, where he lodges at Stoffel Knips’ house and seduces his host’s wife. Stoffel Knips catches them in the act and throws them out. Hanswurst’s distress is such that he tries to kill himself. But thunder strikes the branch on which he was hanging. Two Turks pass by the unconscious couple and take them aboard their felucca going to Turkey. During the trip, Madame Knips gives birth to two children – a boy and a girl – who grow extremely fast. In Turkey, Hanswurst is castrated to be made a eunuch in the Sultan’s seraglio. Madame Knips fell in the sea with her son during the trip, but she manages to swim to shore. She competes with her daughter for the Sultan’s favours; Hanswurst takes offence and makes a scene. He is banished by the Sultan as a result, and returns to Berlin, where he meets a prostitute. He recognizes one of the brothel’s clients as his own son, who also escaped drowning and became a pedant professor of philosophy. During a lecture he gives on the German almanac Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, published by Friedrich Christoph Nicolai, all the characters on stage die from atrocious diarrhoea.