Capitol (Lübeck)
The Capitol was a Lübeck cinema .
New cinema theater
The exact circumstances under which the historic classicist building at Breiten Straße 13 became a cinema are no longer accessible today, as the relevant files were destroyed in the Second World War . A construction plan was retained, which is dated December 1911 and which documents that by then at the latest there were concrete plans to convert the rooms of the Junge bakery , which was located in the house until 1908, into a movie theater; But there is no reference to the architect and the client, so that it is not even certain who arranged the installation of the cinema. The opening announcement names A. Kusch as the director , but he cannot be found in the Lübeck registration archives.
On July 6, 1912, the Neue Lichtspiel-Theater opened , which had 528 seats, 86 of which were on the balcony. The equipment with entrance hall, foyer and cloakroom showed a significant further development compared to the previous, simply furnished early shop cinemas.
Shortly after the beginning of the First World War , the Neue Lichtspiel-Theater changed hands, as the name A. Kusch disappeared and now a W. Zahn acted as director. There is also no information in the official archives for this person.
In November, Johanna Mest (* 1868, † 1930), the divorced wife of Artur Mests , arrived in Lübeck and took over the Neue Lichtspiel-Theater. Towards the end of the First World War, her two youngest sons Arnold and August followed her to Lübeck. Her eldest son Karl came to the city in 1919 and founded his own cinema with Zentral .
UT light games
In October 1925 Johanna Mest changed the name of the Neue Lichtspiel-Theater to UT-Lichtspiele . The reason for this is unknown; a renovation, which otherwise cinema owners used as a reason for a name change, had not taken place.
In 1929, the UT-Lichtspiele were next to the Schauburg one of the two Lübeck cinemas that were the first to be equipped with sound film devices from various systems. There were public disputes between the Mest family and the operators of the Schauburg over the question of which of the two cinemas had the preferred sound film system.
After Johanna Mest died in 1930, her sons Arnold and August ran the UT-Lichtspiele. They initially contracted the cinema as a so-called directing theater to the Magdeburg cinema company run by their father Artur Mest; A short time later, the UT-Lichtspiele became the property of Kammerlichtspiele GmbH. The company employee Kurt Schulz became the new managing director until 1942 .
Capitol
In 1936 the Jewish owners were forced to sell the house in the Breite Straße. The Kammerlichtspiele GmbH, meanwhile managed by Artur Mests second wife Gertrud Mest , acquired the building and had the cinema completely rebuilt, modernized and expanded in the course of 1937. On November 12, 1937 it was reopened under the name Capitol and now had 490 seats in the parquet and 290 on the balcony.
After the forced dissolution of the Mest group in 1942, the Capitol was the only cinema that Gertrud Mest remained. The management was taken over by the trained theater director and projectionist Barbara Bovensiepen , daughter of the Stadthallen tenant Leopold Gonser .
The cinema survived the war unscathed, but one day after the German surrender on May 8, 1945, the Capitol was requisitioned by the British occupying forces as a military cinema and Barbara Bovensiepen was dismissed.
After six years, the cinema was returned to Gertrud Mest in 1951, who had moved to Lübeck in 1949. The reopening took place on April 4th. A few months later, Gertrud Mest leased the Capitol to UFA . In 1958, Ufa employee Wilhelm Hagen took over the management of the film theater , who had been managing director of several Berlin cinemas since the 1920s and who ran the Capitol until 1971.
In 1959, 1960 and 1966 to 1970, the Capitol was the venue for the Nordic Film Days .
Ufa did not extend the lease, which expired at the end of 1970 . On January 1, 1971, the cinema operators Albert Kieft and Wilhelm Grießhammer took over the Capitol as new tenants .
Capitol Cinema Center
On March 16, 1980, the Capitol was closed. In a six-month complete renovation, the cinema was converted into a more efficient cinema center with three box cinemas . The total number of spectator seats decreased to 517, divided into three halls with 380, 63 and 74 seats. On September 18, 1980, it reopened as the Capitol Cinema Center. At the beginning of the 1990s, two more halls with 150 and 130 seats were set up above the existing ones.
During this time, the Capitol was mainly operated as a cinema for mainstream films. On April 19, 2006, the Kieft group closed the cinema center, which has not been used since then.
See also
- On the history of ownership of the property, which was inhabited by Dorothea Schlözer and her husband, Lübeck's mayor Mattheus Rodde , until the French era of Lübeck in 1811 .
- List of Lübeck cinemas
literature
- Petra Schaper: Cinemas in Lübeck . Verlag Graphische Werkstätten GmbH, Lübeck 1987. ISBN 3-925402-35-7
