Kammerspiele Bremen

The Atlantis house in Böttcherstraße served as the seat of the Kammerspiele Bremen from 1946

The Kammerspiele Bremen was a theater in Bremen in the post-war period . The privately run venue existed from February 1946 to May 1949.

history

It was initiated and founded in 1946 as a private theater by Walter Koch and Heinz Suhr , two former members of the theater . The two cultural workers had a burnt-out hall in the Atlantis house on Böttcherstrasse renovated. Although the venue created in this way was very provisional - for example, there was no set of decorations or costumes - the hall still had space for 250 spectators. On February 21, 1946 the Kammerspiele with Lessing's Emilia Galotti was inaugurated .

The director Suhr and the dramaturge Koch left the Kammerspiele during the first season. However, the former did not do this voluntarily: he was arrested for falsifying a denazification questionnaire and concealing his membership in the NSDAP , the SA and the Reichsfilmkammer . The artistic direction then changed several times. Initially, it was the responsibility of Bernhard Wilfert, who was replaced by Erich-Fritz Brücklmeier as director in the 1947/1948 season.

The new dramaturge Gert Westphal characterized the program planning in July 1946 as follows: "We want to record the voices of all peoples" . As a result, English and US American works of the 20th century were not performed so much as classics, but also surrealist and existential French dramas. The ensemble of the Kammerspiele included Eberhard Fechner , Elfriede Kuzmany and Margot Trooger .

In the course of the currency reform in 1948 , the Kammerspiele ran into economic difficulties. At the beginning of the 1948/1949 season Ernst Karchow took over the management, but was unable to increase the steadily declining number of visitors again. In May 1949, The Head in the Loop was staged, the last play before the theater was closed.

On August 25 of the same year, the formerly independent Kammerspiele were incorporated into the newly founded Theater of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen GmbH and from then on they functioned as the small house of the Bremen theater . For decades the Kammerspiele served as a venue for drama productions. Towards the end of the 1970s, however, the ensemble was dissatisfied with the cramped conditions in the Atlantis house . After several protest events, the unsuccessful search for a replacement venue, subsidy cuts and the threatened closure of the drama division, the Senate of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen decided to build a new building, the New Playhouse . When it opened in 1984, the Kammerspiele were closed.

literature

• Herbert Black Forest : The Great Bremen Lexicon . 2nd, updated, revised and expanded edition. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2003, ISBN 3-86108-693-X .
• Frank Schümann: Bremen Theater 1913–2007 . Schünemann Verlag , Bremen 2007, ISBN 978-3-7961-1903-3 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bremer Chronik 1946  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from Radio Bremen ( PDF ).  
2. ^ Theater in Bremen . In: Die Zeit , No. 21/1946