The German revolution of 1918-1919 led to an important production of puppet plays, starting with a series of German and Austrian Communist plays: the “Red Kasper”. However, texts can also be found on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Written in 1920 by a grand-son of the “count of puppets” Franz von Pocci, Nachtschatten is one of those plays that emerged from Bavarian Catholic conservative circles. It was created in reaction to the Communist-inspired government in Munich known as the Bavarian Soviet Republic (like Kasperl und der Kommunist by Franz Drexler). Ernst Pocci stages his own grand-father. In the play, count Franz von Pocci meets the leader of the revolution Kurt Eisner (1867-1919). The latter, like other figures of the movement (for instance Ernst Toller), was the target of particularly brutal anti-Semitic attacks. This aspect also emerges in Ernst Pocci’s play through the caricatural character of the Jew. The play therefore naturally fell into the hands of National-Socialism: it was indeed published posthumously in 1934 by an editor that published resolutely Nazi plays.

The count Franz Pocci comes back on Earth to see Munich, his good old city, once again. There, he encounters a series of characters that, each in their own way, prove the missteps of the Soviet Republic: the Demagogue–under the features of revolutionary Kurt Eisner; Death; the Jew and the Devil; then Kasperl and the Münchner Kindl (“Munich child”, figure inspired by the coat of arms of the city). At the end, a young war invalid arrives and gathers around him university students, workers: an exhilarated crowd, who, fulfilling the count’s wish, begins to awaken “the ancient force of the German people” (“die alte deutsche Volkeskraft”).