The play was written by Franz Fühmann at the request of his friend Joachim Damm, who was 10 years old at the time. The friendship between the writer in his fifties and the young boy had started a year earlier, after Damm had read Fühmann’s novel, Prometheus. Their correspondence, which lasted until Fühmann’s death in 1984, was published by the publishing house Hinstorff as the third volume of Fühmann’s correspondence. In April 1976, Damm asked Fühmann to write “a short story with dialogues, a fat lady, a sultan, a knight, a princess, an Eastern mage and a dragon and a slave” for the puppet theatre that he had set up at school: he had performed his first show on the 10th of March of the same year, with the staging of a puppet play by the Czech puppeteer Pavel Grym from the series “Špejbl & Hurvínek”, which had been made famous in the socialist world thanks to reruns. Fühmann agreed to write the story, and after he had crafted the necessary puppets himself with the help of his mother, Damm was able to stage the premiere of this original play on the 16th of January 1977 to celebrate the writer’s birthday, which was the day before.

A runaway slave meets a dragon which threatens to breathe fire on him; he asks the dragon whether it has the sultan’s permission to do so, predicting that the dragon will eat his former master before the guard kills it. But things do not turn out exactly as expected. Right before the audience, the dragon meets a knight who wants the sultan to recognise his superiority to become a knight too. The sultan refuses to talk, appointing the dragon to speak in his stead and authorising him to breathe fire on the knight. The slave returns in order to sit on the throne that he thinks empty – and it is indeed soon to be the case, because the sultan suddenly decides to follow in the deceased knight’s footsteps and take his place. Meanwhile, the fat Katja, who was dancing and singing for the sultan, has moved in with the dragon, and everyone is invited for coffee.