Bergwaldtheater Weißenburg

Bergwaldtheater

The Bergwaldtheater Weißenburg is an open-air theater in Weißenburg , district town in the central Franconian district of Weißenburg-Gunzenhausen , on the Weißenburger Alb . Every year there is a festival summer in the Bergwaldtheater. It has a total of 1232 places in three blocks; in the rear there are so-called root places. The stage is registered under the monument number D-5-77-177-177 as a monument in the Bavarian monument list.

Geographical location

The Bergwaldtheater is located on the southern edge of the city of Weißenburg on the Weißenburger Alb on the edge of the Weißenburg city forest at an altitude of around 560 m above sea level. NN . It is located on the slopes of the Ludwigshöhe in the Schönau settlement , east of the Jakobsruhe . The theater is on Holzgasse , a street leading to Haardt .

history

As early as the 18th century, open-air performances of plays and operas were held in the vicinity of what would later become the theater. Perhaps the earliest performance, Count Waltron , had to be canceled in 1791 due to too much audience. In the 1820s, the guest performances of the theater troupe under Lorenz Ebert were very popular, later the place was only used sporadically for student performances before the natural theater was set up under Mayor Hermann Fitz.

The natural theater was set up in 1928 according to plans by the garden architect Bernhard Nill in a former quarry on Weißenburger Holzgasse (Fl. No. 3038/14). In 1929 it was inaugurated with a performance of the Weißenburger Waldspiel by Johanna Arntzen . At the inauguration, only amateurs were on stage, but professional actors and singers acted on the stage in the following years. From 1931 to 1940 the theater had its own artistic director, Egon Schmid. During the two world wars, the theater was idle.

In 1932 there was a crisis: In view of the economic problems, numerous citizens campaigned for the theater to be closed. Mayor Fitz negotiated on the one hand with Nazi figures, who could also use the theater as a location for propaganda events, and on the other hand with Erika Mann , whose adaptation of Mozart's work Apollo et Hyacinthus seu Hyacinthi Metamorphosis , KV 38, interested him and who, through Schmid, also interested him offered a commitment. Erika Mann initially refused, but after Ricki Hallgarten's suicide decided to accept the engagement. Mayor Fitz was, however, urged by the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur not to let Erika Mann play in Weißenburg. Intendant Schmid, who was a member of the NSDAP , tried to appease and was thereupon threatened with a party expulsion procedure. In addition, the party announced a boycott of the theater if the contract with Erika Mann was not canceled. The legal disputes about the insolvency of the theater and the tourist association for Erika Mann, which was not paid in time, expanded into a campaign against the entire Mann family and Erika Mann's appearances in Germany were hardly possible since then. After the synchronization , the processes were no longer completed.

From 1936 onwards, only operas were performed in the Bergwaldtheater; from 1940 to 1951 the theater was shut down completely. After that, the Nuremberg Municipal Theaters used the theater for 21 years. Since 1973 artists from all over Germany have performed there again. In 1993 a program of Funny Musicians was filmed in the theater. Since then, artists like Max Giesinger , Kaya Yanar , Roger Hodgson , La Brass Banda and similar musicians and groups have performed regularly . The home game festival attracted almost 4,000 visitors to Ludwigshöhe in 2017.

For the 90th anniversary in July 2019, the play written by Franzobel especially for the Bergwaldtheater about the history of Weißenburg, Der Lebkuchenmann, was performed.

literature

Egon Schmid: The Weißenburger Bergwaldtheater. The ideal of a German landscape stage , Weißenburg 1930
Gisela Stanka / Dr. Günter W. Zwanzig: Bergwaldtheater Weißenburg. Development of a natural stage , Weißenburg 1979
Martin Weichmann: A fanatic of the game in the open air. Egon Schmid - From Bergwaldtheater to the Reichsbund der Freilicht- und Volksschauspiele , in: villa nostra / Weißenburger Heimatblätter, 2/2009
Martin Weichmann: The Erika Mann case. The Bergwaldtheater Weißenburg on the way to the Third Reich , in: villa nostra / Weißenburger Heimatblätter, 2/2004, p. 5ff
Martin Weichmann, Naturheilpark and Kurhotel Ludwigshöhe. The visions of Dr. Hermann Fitz in the area of the Bergwaldtheater , in: villa nostra / Weißenburger Heimatblätter, 2/2011, p. 5ff
Gotthard Kießling: Weissenburg-Gunzenhausen district (= Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation [Hrsg.]: Monuments in Bavaria . Volume V.70 / 1 ). Karl M. Lipp Verlag, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-87490-581-0 .