A lovely, quiet, every-day story (i.e. about the lives of good people with a modest amount of drama in it) with many touching moments. I do like stories like that - extremes tend to bore me.
Synopsis (SPOILERS!)
The first-person narrator, an unnamed young boy, makes friends with master-turner Paulsen. When he hears him called 'Paul Puppeteer' (the meaning of the German title of the book', Paulsen tells the story of his life, how a family of puppeteers performed in the small town when he was a boy and he became equally fascinated with the Punch puppet and friends with the puppeteer's daughter, how the former led to friendship with the family, who eventually left the town never to return. A chance re-union twelve years later leads to a happy marriage in spite of some hostilities (the puppeteers were, at the time, considered basically vagrants). It's not so much the social structures that are the topic here, though, but rather the individual strengths and weaknesses of the characters.