Dolls/puppets as anthropomorphic beings invite human beings to interact with them. If doll and human meet, the doll/puppet creates an incentive for action in the sense of a doll-specific affordance, which stimulates the inner-psychic interplay of identity and alterity in the human counterpart. In the paper it is argued that alterity is situationally inscribed in the doll/puppet as a psychological narrative: the doll is perceived as alter that correlates with an awareness of ego. It is an alterity offered by the doll with a performative potential for the human counterpart. The coincidence of alterity narrative (on the part of the doll) and new self-assurance (on the part of the human) is also found in literary texts. Using the example of two stories – An Emigrant (1914/1930) by Selma Lagerlöf and Popp and Mingel (1960) by Marie Luise Kaschnitz – these considerations are explored: Two adolescent boys take up the doll's narrative of alterity as a potential for differentiating their self-concept, which leads to their being able to release themselves from gender role clichés for a certain time.

The essay relates Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun from 2021 to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story The Sandman from 1816. Both literary texts address the effect of anthropomorphic artifacts on human characters within the narrated world. The essay elaborates on the extent to which Ishiguro’s novel references Hoffmann’s narrative. It becomes clear that both literary texts question the boundary between human and thing without dissolving this boundary. With their very different narrative styles, both texts involve the reader and allow participation in the humanization of the anthropomorphic artifacts.

In the theater production Unheimliches Tal / Uncanny Valley (2018) by Thomas Melle and Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokoll), an animatronic double of the writer and playwright Thomas Melle, who suffers from bipolar disorder, acts on stage and gives an autobiographical lecture in his place. Melle’s experience of illness is taken as the basis for a lecture-performance, the central object of which seems to be the technically animated doll itself, which on the one hand functions as the actor of the autobiographical lecture and on the other hand is repeatedly exhibited in its objecthood. Following on from Eva Illouz’s research on the emergence and effect of a therapeutic discourse, this contribution pursues the reading of Unheimliches Tal / Uncanny Valley as a way of performing the self through therapy. This is both effectively produced and artistically sharpened, and its ambivalence is demonstrated and reflected.

The 1950s and 1960s series of black-and-white photographs by the Polish artist Marek Piasecki (1935-2011) entitled The Doll as well as the objects created in the same period in which the artist wove the motif of a doll are analysed in the context of the doll text by Rainer Maria Rilke and the work of Hans Bellmer, complemented by reflections by Anna Szyjkowska-Piotrowska, Georges Didi-Huberman and other contemporary authors.. Fragmentation of bodies in these works by Piasecki is not a device of eroticization or fetishization, as in Bellmer, but makes one aware of their defenceless fragility and mortality. As a typical abject Piasecki’s doll attract as much as they put one off; their presence verges on unbearable as it awakens the anxiety of death.

Reviews of Jean Nathan: "The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll. The Search for Dare Wright" and Brook Ashley: "Dare Wright and the Lonely Doll. A Biography"

Dolls appear in leading and supporting roles in the work of the German children’s book author (and illustrator) Tony Schumacher (1848-1931). Schumacher was an extremely popular writer in the 19th century who published dozens of books as well as being a collector of antique furniture, nativity figures and much more. In her autobiographical writings, this largely forgotten author places a particular emphasis on her collection of more than 200 dolls which undergo interesting narrative and pictural transformations. The playful approach of the author and illustrator with both individual dolls and doll collectives is analyzed and subtly coordinated with the narrative content and its visualization providing examples of images and texts from the period between 1885 and 1930 which are classified biographically and historically.

This article is focused on the work and life of the doll maker Edith Samuel (1907- 1964). She created her first “portrait dolls” during the 1920s and 1930s in Essen, Germany. They became known as "everyday dolls" and "Jewish dolls". Edith Samuel's talent as a doll maker became apparent from early on, and in the 1930s she was renowned in Germany for her art. In 1939, she emigrated to Palestine, and she successfully started a second career as a doll maker in Erez Israel. However, it is her early work that is to be contemplated here: A whole 'generation' of peculiar Jewish portrait dolls – which contributed to their owners’ sense of identity – must not be forgotten. These dolls were particularly important as animated companions in times of murderous persecution.

The following graphic novel is an excerpt from the fully automated puppet theater Of someone who went forth to find a flat in Berlin. An automation-drama in three acts – Act 3: In ultimate consequence by Clemens Schöll (2019/2020). For this version, the footage from the filmic documentation as well as the 3D scans was transformed with the support of various automated software components. As in the puppet theater original, automation processes are used to talk about automation: Who has which accesses, who sets the rules and who benefits from automation?

Sex dolls with AI (artificial intelligence), candy colored avatars and photographed (shop window) dolls: In Louisa Clement's works the doll appears in different shapes as a central motif for questioning the human body in digital contexts. Fragmented, anonymized, and almost dehumanized, dolls, avatars, or seemingly lifelike reproductions of the artist's body confront viewers. The absence of the physical body, which is suggested in the dolls as representatives, leads to a tense interplay between virtuality and reality.

In his film Orlando ferito (2015), filmmaker Vincent Dieutre creates a collage of different images, sequences and overlapping narratives. One of these narrative strands is about the secret life of the Sicilian pupi backstage at their puppet theatre. Their story develops into the actual thread of the film and brings together different levels (autobiographical, essayistic, aesthetic) in a parable. Dieutre’s aesthetic procedures crystallise in the filmic staging of the play about Orlando, who is caught in a deep melancholy, in a constant reversal of reality and fiction, of life and theatre. The Sicilian pupi contribute to this with their allegorical potential by offering multiple identifications. Thus, not only Dieutre recognises himself in a marionette, but also his friends and interlocutors become confused in the threads of the pupi, until their gaze becomes the mirror of the audience in the darkness of the cinema hall.