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The Berlin Museum of Ethnology has a large collection of all kinds of wayang puppets from Java and Bali. Most of them originate from the 2nd half of the 19th century. The focus of this article is on the Javanese wayang kulit puppets. They were mainly sold to the museum by two Dutch collectors, Pleyte and Masthoff in the end of the 19th century. No curator so far published the fact that these puppets of the Berlin collection are smaller than the average figures from Java. In quality terms they are less refined than the usual puppets of that time. In fact they are called wayang kaper, puppets used for training the dalang, the puppet master. Nevertheless this collection seems to be one of the biggest wayang kaper sets in Western museums. The Balinese puppets, however, and especially the large wayanggolek puppet collection, some of them dating back to the middle of the 19th century, are high quality objects. As a joint project, one young Javanese dalang came in 2009 to the Berlin Museum of Ethnology to work on the Javanese wayang kulit collection. Parts of the wayang puppets will be seen in the future in the Humboldt Forum. The last time they were displayed was more than 10 years ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]