Old Town Festival (Hanover)

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The old town festival in Hanover first took place in 1970 and is one of the first old town festivals of its kind in Germany.

history

First old town festival, 1970: The artist János Nádasdy with his action art Wohnsperre in front of the Lower Saxony state parliament on Leibnizufer

In the course of general efforts to revitalize both inner and outer cities, the first Hanover Old Town Festival was held on August 29 and 30, 1970, with the participation of Mike Gehrke , who later became the city's image manager . Under the motto “Be there and join in”, the festival attended by around 200,000 people also marked the start of the “ street art program ”, which was also noticed nationwide, initially for four years .

The old town festival was part of a district culture and city ​​marketing before these terms were even invented:

"In Hanover, people always think of something,"

wrote the Frankfurter Neue Presse in 1970, referring to the first leisure homes in Germany, such as the Linden leisure home , the first flea market in Germany , the street art program and the old town festival, “all of them small cultural revolutions at a time when [elsewhere] still“ bums ” Water hoses were driven off the street ”.

In the crush of the first old town festival, people came closer to one another; young people, many "medieval" and "a number of older people who, despite some wrinkled eyebrows, made a good face into a good game".

In the 1970s in particular, the annual old town festival in Hanover was characterized by cabaret and “more sophisticated entertainment”. In 1975 the flea market was held at the same time around the Nanas set up the year before .

In the same year, however, Oberstadtdirektor Rudolf Koldewey wanted to cut the subsidies for the maintenance of the city image from around 100,000 DM to 30,000 DM - an end to the Alststadtfest would have been the result. After citizen protests, also via letters to the editor, for example in the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung , the subsidy remained constant, but the rents for the stands were increased and the commercialization of festivities , which can also be observed nationwide, increased .

Due to (urban) lack of money, the old town festival was not held in 1982 and 1983. When in 1984 the festival was held again without any municipal subsidies, around 500,000 guests attended the festival. But although the number of visitors was initially consistently high, from the second half of the 1980s onwards the festival slumped more and more to an event focused purely on physical pleasures. The reasons were a weaker financial security by the city of Hanover and a general change in the mood in the population.

During the old town festival in 1992, 16 participants were injured in a bomb attack. The festival was then canceled and did not take place in 1993.

From 1994 to 2007 the event, sometimes also as a "Leinefest", was continued to a reduced extent by restaurateur Rainer Aulich , operator of the Ernst August brewery .

In 2009 the old town festival was revived to a further reduced extent.

literature

Web links

Commons : Altstadtfest  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Imre Grimm (text), Dirk Meußling (pictures): Das neue Hannover , Hannover: Schlütersche , 2002, ISBN 3-87706-671-2 , p. 79; online through google books
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Waldemar R. Röhrbein: Old Town Festival (see literature)
  3. ^ Hugo Thielen : Gehrke, Mike. In: Stadtlexikon Hannover , p. 207
  4. ↑ Helmut Knocke , Hugo Thielen: 1961, in: Hannover Art and Culture Lexicon, p. 20
  5. ↑ Peter Stettner: Old Town Festival (see literature)
  6. ↑ see Old Town Festival 1975 on Youtube (section Weblinks )
  7. ↑ Ines Katenhusen: Nanas. In: Stadtlexikon Hannover , p. 459
  8. ↑ Lu Seegers: The colored city. Image and communication policy in Hanover in the early seventies. In: Adelheid von Saldern : City and communication in times of upheaval in the Federal Republic of Germany , in the series Contributions to the History of Communication (BGK), Vol. 17, Stuttgart: Steiner, 2006, ISBN 978-3-515-08918-0 and ISBN 3-515-08918 -7 , pp. 181-208; partly online via Google books
  9. ^ Waldemar R. Röhrbein : Urban redevelopment between high altitude and normalcy. In: History of the City of Hanover , Vol. 2: From the beginning of the 19th century to the present , ed. by Klaus Mlynek and Waldemar R. Röhrbein, with the collaboration of Dieter Brosius , Carl-Hans Hauptmeyer , Siegfried Müller and Helmut Plath , Schlütersche , Hannover 1994, ISBN 3-87706-364-0 , here: note 736 on p. 797; online through google books
  10. ^ Waldemar R. Röhrbein: 1983. In: Hannover Chronik , p. 291; online through google books
  11. ↑ Tobias Morchner: When the terror came to Hanover, HAZ, August 29, 2012 [1]

Coordinates: 52 ° 22 '18.2 "  N , 9 ° 44' 4.5"  E