Lichtburg (Essen)
The Lichtburg is a historic cinema in the city center of Essen . With 1250 seats today, it has the largest cinema in Germany. The building, which originally dates from 1928, has been a listed building since 1998 . Since the last renovation in 2003, there has been a second, small cinema hall with 150 seats in the basement, which is named after the Indian film actor Sabu .
history
prehistory
As early as 1896, the first moving pictures were announced in traveling cinemas , some of which had a dubious reputation in Essen newspapers. In 1909 the owner opened the Germania Theater with 488 seats in the Alfredushaus on Frohnhauser Straße . It closed in spring 1932 and was reopened as City on August 27th of that year by City-Theater GmbH . On September 5, 1913, the Projektions-AG Union (PAGU) opened the Schauburg at Viehofer Tor , which was then the largest cinema building in Germany, with 2000 folding chair seats . The Schauburg described itself as the colossus of light games . By 1914 there were twenty cinemas in Essen. In 1924 the city of Essen decided on a general settlement plan , with the help of which the central Burgplatz should also be redesigned. For this purpose, a new movie theater dominating the square was planned in the New Objectivity style . It was to be built in place of the old county hall.
Establishment and opening
The castle square-Bau AG , it consisted of municipal government and private investors to put urban architecture of a piece as a target. For this project, the Essen city planning officer Ernst Bode designed the movie theater as a building, and the Essen architects Heydkamp and Bucerius (Richard Heydkamp and Curt Bucerius ), based on original designs by the architect Lothar Kaminski, designed the interior with a dome 20 meters in diameter, the largest in one at the time German theater space.
The new cinema was opened as Lichtburg on October 18, 1928 and had around 2,000 folding upholstered seats with an electrical space warning system. If a cinema-goer sat down, a closed electrical contact reported to the cashier in the entrance area that the seat was occupied. Opening broke through the 150,000 Reichsmarks expensive Wurlitzer - cinema organ , the largest, which had until then installed in a European cinema, played. She could already imitate traffic noise and thunder. The 30-member Lichtburg Orchestra, whose musicians were partly on loan from the Cologne Philharmonic, played “ Orpheus in the Underworld ” under the baton of the house band master and organist Josef Schafgans . It later accompanied silent films . After the performance of the ballet group from the Parisian vaudeville Folies Bergère , the curtain opened for the main film Marquis d'Eon, the Pompadour's Spy .
About a year after the opening, the sound film came to the Lichtburg. At this time, however, the first crisis for the Lichtburg was announced, as the citizens hardly spent any more money on the cinema during the economic crisis in 1929 .
expropriation
During the National Socialist era , the Lichtburg was used for propaganda purposes. The German newsreel was also presented here . It often showed footage from Essen - for example, whenever Adolf Hitler visited the Krupp works . Because Essen was an important industrial and armaments location for the National Socialists.
In 1933/1934 the Jewish operator, the Berlin publisher, entrepreneur and co-founder of German film journalism, Karl Wolffsohn, was forced to sell the cinema to Universum Film AG far below its value due to massive pressure from the Essen Nazi party leader Josef Terboven . The Lichtburg is an early example of the Aryanization of Jewish property in Germany. Wolffsohn received only a tenth of the actual value. He and his family fled to Palestine in 1939 . In 1940 the anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süß was also shown in the Lichtburg. Wolffsohn returned in 1949 and fought for compensation, but he did not live to see the end of the court process. A memorial plaque on the Lichtburg has been commemorating Karl Wolffsohn since 2006. It was unveiled in the presence of the grandson, the historian Michael Wolffsohn . He heads the Berlin Lichtburg Foundation , which is involved there with a German-Turkish-Jewish cultural center, among other things.
Destruction and rebuilding
During the Second World War , the Lichtburg was almost destroyed during the Allied bombing raids on Essen on March 5, 1943. Essen was a main target of the Allies because of its arms industry . The auditorium burned out completely, but the facade was preserved.
Almost two years after the end of the war, the city was looking for new operators in a newspaper advertisement. Heinrich Jaeck and Erich Menz , who had already run several Essen film theaters before the war, were commissioned to run the Lichtburg as a top-class theater. The cinema was rebuilt between 1948 and 1950 in the design language of the early 1950s. During the reconstruction, the architect Carlos Dudek was particularly involved in the film bar . On March 23, 1950, the reopening took place with a speech by the then Mayor Hans Toussaint . Here appeared Willi Forst personally his film Wiener lasses in the now 1,700 places offered movie theater.
Premiere cinema in the 1950s and 1960s
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Lichtburg was considered the most important premiere cinema in Germany. It benefited from good contacts between the operator Erich Menz and film producers and distributors. Romy Schneider came to the film premiere of Die Deutschmeister in 1955 . Since Germany breathed a sigh of relief again after winning the World Cup in 1954 , many of the successful footballers were also guests, including Helmut Rahn from Essen . In 1957 Romy Schneider came to the Lichtburg again for the premiere of the love comedy Monpti . From 1960 to 1993, the operators kept four guest books in which to premiere for example Zarah Leander , Jean Marais , Heinz Rühmann , Sonja Ziemann , Curd Jürgens , Hans Albers , Heinz Erhardt , Maria Schell , Hans Moser , Dieter Borsche , Ruth Leuwerik , Pierre Brice , Lex Barker , Buster Keaton and Gary Cooper entered . If the Lichtburg was used as an event hall, artists such as Louis Armstrong with Velma Middleton (1952), Count Basie or Juliette Gréco performed .
In 1963 Ilse Menz took over the management of the Lichtburg and then shaped Essen's film and cinema history for around fifty years. The Ilse-Menz-Weg near it was named after her in 2004.
The advent of television in the 1960s was also associated with economic losses for the German cinema landscape and caused the cinema to die out.
Again in the 1970s the premieres became less frequent and the guests changed. Instead of the Hollywood greats, more European actors came, for example Bud Spencer and Terence Hill . The reason was the poor economic situation in the Ruhr area , in which unemployment rose sharply, particularly due to the closure of mines.
In Essen, for example, two thirds of all cinemas closed within 15 years. However, due to its size, its stage for show and theater and its central location, the Lichtburg was able to hold up until the 1980s.
Multiplex competition and renewal
In 1991 the multiplex cinema Cinemaxx Essen was opened , also in the city center . Immediately after its start, the number of visitors to all conventional cinemas in Essen, which were considered technically out of date, plummeted. With the exception of the Lichtburg, all cinemas had to close after a short time, including the Europa-Kino on Viehofer Straße and the Grand-Palast on Rottstraße, each with several screening rooms. The Essenes alone cinemas remained largely unaffected by their different target audience.
From the mid-1990s, the Lichtburg was repeatedly threatened with closure. The building complex in which the Lichtburg is located was also in need of renovation. In 1994, parts of Essen's politics and administration planned to convert the building in the center of the city, on the pedestrian zone, into a shopping arcade and to sell the city property for budget refurbishment. A show stage was also planned later.
In 1998 the Lichtburg came into the hands of Essener Filmkunsttheater GmbH , whose managing director is Marianne Menze , who runs the Lichtburg together with her husband Hanns-Peter Hüster to this day. With their help and the support of the City of Essen's cultural advisory board, politicians, artists and media representatives were won over to support the Lichtburg as a cinema. These included Wim Wenders , Wolfgang Niedecken and Gerhard Schröder . Finally, in 2000, a unanimous council decision was made to keep the Lichtburg as a cinema. After the decision to relocate the Essen Adult Education Center to the east of the Lichtburg building, investors were found, with whose help the project finally took shape. In a one-year, seven million euro large project, the architecture was completely restored in the style of the 1950s in accordance with the listed buildings. This included the facade as well as the historic cinema, the foyer, the film bar (formerly known as the tea room), offices, restaurants and the new extension of the adult education center, which was designed by the architects Hartmut Miksch and Wolfgang Rücker . After restoration in March 2002, the Lichtburg was reopened on March 16, 2003 with the German premiere of the film The Miracle of Bern . The Atelier -Theater from the 1970s gave way to today's Blue Salon .
To mark its 85th anniversary, a gala took place on October 18, 2013, at which Caroline Link with the main actors Ulrich Tukur and Samuel Schneider were guests for the German premiere of their film Exit Marrakech . Among the well-wishers present were other celebrities such as Sönke Wortmann , Hannelore Kraft , Werner Hansch and Lord Mayor Reinhard Pass . Even 90 years Lichtenburg were celebrated, and on October 18, 2018 Wim Wenders and Mario Adorf and film producer Christoph Ott were guests.
Today's cinema
The Lichtburg now has a 150 square meter rollable screen equipped with modern projection technology, behind which there is a stage, so that the hall, which can accommodate 1250 spectators, can also be used for theater and cabaret events as well as for readings and concerts . The Lichtburg is one of the few cinemas in Germany that still has a 70 mm film projector. The sound system is designed for Dolby Digital and DTS . In the second, small Sabu cinema , there is an additional 150 seats.
The Lichtburg is once again the setting for numerous premieres, especially works by German filmmakers. It is still not an art house cinema. Due to its size, the program focus is on American and European mainstream cinema.
Special programs are also shown. Among other things, the then Chancellor Gerhard Schröder spoke on the cinema stage in 2006 about his biography decisions. My life in politics . In the same year Hape Kerkeling presented his program Again on Tour . In 2013 and 2014 there were premieres for the television series The Last Bull , and in 2019 for the movie of the same name. On January 25, 2015, in the presence of the President of the Bundestag Norbert Lammert, the documentary Shoah about the Holocaust was shown in its full length of over nine hours. The producer Claude Lanzmann presented it personally. On April 8, 2015, the Dutch director Mark Verkerk presented The New Wilderness about the Oostvaardersplassen nature development area . The Metropole Orkest under the direction of Maurice Luttikhuis accompanied the German premiere live. From November 20 to 23, 2015, the Düsseldorf music group Kraftwerk played seven concerts in the Lichtburg as part of their Germany tour.
The entire building complex, which also includes the adjoining adult education center on a total of 17,500 m² (Lichtburg: around 4,000 m²), was subject to a heritable building right contract until 2018 . The City Council of Essen decided in June 2018 to terminate this prematurely in 2018. The city took over the building with a book value of 18.5 million euros from its own property subsidiary, the property management city of Essen GmbH (GVE) . In this way, the city prevents a sale to private third parties and secures the continued operation of the cinema with longer-term leases.
On February 19, 2020, the City Council of Essen decided to overhaul all 1250 cinema seats in the movie theater due to wear and tear. 670,000 euros are estimated for this.
literature
- Frank Kerner in: Work & Everyday Life. Industrial culture in the Ruhr Museum . 1st edition. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne 2015, ISBN 978-3-86335-821-1 , p. 155 .
- Matthias Kitschenberg: The Lichtburg. In: Preservation of monuments in the Rhineland. No. 3, 1994, ISSN 0177-2619 , pp. 97-102.
- Christoph Wilmer (Ed.): Karl Wolffsohn and the Lichtburg. The story of an aryanization . Klartext Verlag, Essen 2006, ISBN 3-89861-536-7
- Christoph Wilmer, Dorothea Bessen, Paul Hofmann, Martina Kroll (Red.): 70 years of Lichtburg Essen 1928-1998 . Essener Filmkunsttheater GmbH, Essen 1998, ISBN 3-924379-49-1
- Christoph Wilmer, Dorothea Bessen, Martina Kroll, Marianne Menze (Red.): 75 Years of Lichtburg Essen 1928-2003, Chronicle Part II .
- Christoph Wilmer: The Lichtburg in Essen (= Rheinische Kunststätten . Issue No. 524). Rhenish Association for Monument Preservation and Landscape Protection , Cologne 2011, ISBN 978-3-86526-0567 .
- TV documentary: How the dream factory got into the district ; from the series Doku am Freitag ; by Carsten Günther, editor: Susanne Spröer; WDR ; First broadcast: April 30, 2010.
Web links
- Homepage of the Lichtburg
- 360 ° panorama of the cinema
- The Lichtenburg in Old Postcards (English)
- Lichtburg monument (PDF; 680 kB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ City Food: 15869, House File Frohnhauser 19-21, Volume 1 (1867-1928), application for permission to construct a cinematograph , p 216
- ↑ Essener People's Newspaper, August 27, 1932
- ↑ The Lichtburg opens. In: Essener Volkszeitung from October 19, 1928; Visions in stone
- ↑ On the redesign of the Burgplatz. In: Essener Volkszeitung from July 12, 1924
- ^ Spiegel online: Historische Filmtheater, Die Kinosaurier - October 14, 2008 , last viewed on January 26, 2015
- ^ Norbert Post, Hartmut Welters: Lichtburg - Burgplatz. The 2000–2004 project . Property management city of Essen GmbH. Dortmund 2004, p. 34.
- ^ LVR Office for Monument Preservation in the Rhineland, 2014 ; accessed on August 17, 2018
- ↑ Frank Kerner in: Work & Everyday Life. Industrial culture in the Ruhr Museum . 1st edition. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne 2015, ISBN 978-3-86335-821-1 , p. 155 .
- ↑ DerWesten.de of October 19, 2013: The Lichtburg is 85 - Germany's cinema scene congratulates ; accessed on August 17, 2018
- ↑ DerWesten.de of January 25, 2015: Claude Lanzmann shows monumental work “Shoa” in the Lichtburg ; accessed on August 17, 2018
- ↑ Wolfgang Kintscher: Lichtburg-Bau will soon be in municipal hands again ; In: Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of July 21, 2018
- ^ Council decides to overhaul the seating in the Lichtburg ; In: Press release of the City of Essen from February 20, 2020
Coordinates: 51 ° 27 ′ 17 ″ N , 7 ° 0 ′ 47 ″ E