Royal City Theater

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Building of the Royal City Theater (1824–1851)

The Königsstädtische Theater (contemporary always Königsstädter Theater ) on Berlin's Alexanderplatz was a privately run and financed people's theater in contrast to the city's court stages. The stage was dedicated to the popular play , which had a special nimbus since the Wars of Liberation . Because the theater names in Berlin were associated with a license instead of a building, the name was transferred to various buildings outside of the royal city after 1850 . The Wallner Theater was mainly known as the Royal City Theater .

Original building

The Congress of Vienna made the operation of the private Viennese theaters widely known. So advocated King Friedrich Wilhelm III. a similar facility in Berlin. Ludwig Tieck worked to ensure that a standing stage for the cheerful theater genre could surpass the level of the comedy booths. The Königsstädtisches Theater became the first civil theater in Berlin. The founding financiers included the banker Joseph Mendelssohn and Wilhelm Christian Benecke von Gröditzberg .

The theater got its name after its location in the Berlin district of Königsstadt . It was built on the model of the Parisian boulevard theaters and the Viennese suburban theaters according to plans by Carl Theodor Ottmer and opened on August 4, 1824 by Karl Friedrich Cerf , who ran it until his death in 1845. The sponsorship was a stock corporation that was heavily dependent on court grants.

With the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm IV. To the throne in 1840, the royal city theater lost the court subsidies and found it difficult to maintain. In the March Revolution of 1848 rebellious events took place in the theater and its surroundings. In the censorship- free period that followed, politically undesirable pieces were staged , so the theater was closed when censorship was reintroduced in 1851. In 1850 the Friedrich-Wilhelmstädtische Theater ( Deutsches Theater (Berlin) ) was opened, in which antics and folk plays were also given. In 1932 the Berlin administration had the original building, which had been used for other purposes since 1851 (see Alexanderplatz ), demolished.

repertoire

As is customary for this type of stage, the Königsstadt Theater maintained a mixed repertoire of farce , melodrama , singspiel and pantomime . Typical products were Louis Angely's Das Fest der Handwerker (1829) or Franz Gläsers Des Adlers Horst (1832). It was not allowed to perform tragedies or serious operas. From 1825 Karl von Holtei worked as a playwright or in-house author for the theater, whose contributions to the Königsstädter Theater appeared in 1832. Carl Blum tried here to introduce a German variant of vaudeville . Theatrical authors like Angely, David Kalisch and Adolf Glaßbrenner shaped the Berlin local posse , whose wit was more political than its Viennese counterpart.

Henriette Sontag during her time in Berlin

Famous actors and singers such as Josef Spitzeder , Heinrich Schmelka and Friedrich Beckmann helped the theater gain its reputation. Glaßbrenner and Beckmann created the corner stand Nante as the standing role of the Berlin local posse on this stage . For economic reasons, Italian (and French) operas were also staged. Henriette Sontag was the singing star for two years and shone in roles with Gioachino Rossini . Franz Grillparzer's and Conradin Kreutzer's opera Melusina premiered in 1833 .

“You enter the Königstädter Theater. You choose a place in the first tier, because relatively fewer people come there; and if one is to see a farce, one has to sit comfortably and not be remotely embarrassed by the importance of art which causes many to be crammed into a theater to see a play, as if it were an eternal matter Bliss. (...) The orchestra is ready, the curtain is already rising a bit, then that other orchestra begins that does not obey the concertmaster's stick, but follows an inner urge, that other orchestra, the natural sound of the gallery that Beckmann is already in guessed the scenery. In general, I sat far back in the box, so I couldn't see the second tier and the gallery at all, which protruded over my head like a hat peak. This noise is all the more adventurous. Wherever I could look there was largely emptiness; the large room of the theater was transformed into the belly of the sea monster in which Jonas sat; the din in the gallery was like movement in the monster's viscera . From the moment the gallery begins to make music, there is no need for accommodation; because Beckmann animates her and she Beckmann . (...) So I lay in my box, thrown away like the clothes of a bathing person, stretched out against the stream of laughter, mischief and jubilation that roared past me without ceasing: I could see nothing but the theater room, hear nothing but the noise in which I lived. Only now and then did I get up, watched Beckmann and laughed so tired that I sank down again on the edge of the rushing river from weariness. "

- Sören Kierkegaard : The repetition

Wallner Theater

New Wallner Theater since 1864
The theater environment on the Sineck plan (1882)
Wallner Theater on a section of the city map

Rudolf Cerf inherited the license and with it the famous theater name from his father. From 1852 to 1854 he called the former building of the Circus Renz at Charlottenstraße 90 again Königsstädtisches Theater (see Berlin Theater ).

In 1855, the actor and writer Franz Wallner (1810–1876) acquired the license to operate the cultural institution. His building on Blumenstrasse , previously a theater in Concordia , was known as the Königsstädtisches Vaudeville Theater until 1858 . Kapellmeister was August Conradi . After Cerf had withdrawn, the facility was named Wallner-Theater or Wallner's Theater in 1858 , which it kept until 1864. It was still mainly dedicated to the local farce and experienced a heyday with actors like Karl Helmerding and Anna Schramm . The house was on Blumenstrasse 9b, the entrance was at Grüner Weg. The exclamation “Oh, you green nine !” Is often attributed to this theater.

In 1864, Wallner had a new Wallner Theater built a little further south, at Wallner-Theater-Strasse 35, according to plans by the architect Eduard Titz . After its inauguration, it was considered one of the largest (for 1200 spectators) and most beautiful in Berlin. Rudolf Bial became conductor here. Composers as diverse as Paul Lincke , Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek and Victor Hollaender worked as conductors in the new Wallner Theater . Theodor Herzl made his debut in 1888 as a comedian with the play His Highness . Schwänke such as Pension Schöller (1890) were premiered. Actors at the Wallner Theater included Ernst Formes and Ernestine Wegner .

The building was renamed Schiller-Theater Ost in 1894 under Raphael Löwenfeld . Camilla Spira and Lotte Lenya played on this stage after the First World War . After an unsuccessful interlude as the National Socialist People's Theater , at which the play Blood Seed by Joseph Goebbels was premiered on March 10, 1929 , the house advanced to the third Piscator stage in 1930 and was therefore a site of multimedia avant-garde theater. The time-critical piece § 218 - tormented people by Karl Credé-Hoerder was performed here. During the Second World War the theater served as a record studio, but before the end of the war it fell to rubble. Up until 1970, only Wallnertheaterstraße was a reminder of the former cultural institution. At the place of the theater there is now a sports field.

The old Wallner theater, on the other hand, became an inn with a club theater . Wallner leased it to Theodor Lebrun in 1868 , who renamed it the Bundeshallen-Theater . In the following year, 1869, a newly opened theater on Greifswalder Strasse was renamed the Königsstädtisches Theater . In 1872 the house on Blumenstrasse was renamed Königsstädtisches Theater . So the names were often changed. The Residenz Theater has been located directly to the west since 1871 . Actors who later went to film, such as Harry Walden or Hans Mierendorff , began their careers here. It was converted into a cinema as early as 1910 . Next to it was a dance palace, the area was a nightlife district of the city. - Only one house from the 1920s (Singerstraße 1) on the site of the “green nine” with a remnant of the old Blumenstraße reminds of this submerged part of Berlin.

Theater directors (selection)

literature

  • Otto Franz Gensichen: air of the scenery. Wallnertheater memories . Paetel-Verlag, Berlin 1909.
  • Willi Eylitz: The Königstädtisches Theater in Berlin. Dissertation typescript, Rostock 1940.
  • Erika Wischer: The Wallner Theater under the direction of Franz Wallner (1855–1868). The Berlin local antics theater of the post-march. Schoen, Munich. 1967.
  • Otto Schneidereit: Berlin how it cries and laughs. Walks through Berlin's operetta history , Lied der Zeit, Berlin 1976.
  • Rainer Theobald: Carl Theodor Ottmer as a theater architect. Investigations into the development and effects of theater buildings in the Biedermeier era . Phil. Diss. Berlin 1976. (Fundamental to building history and literature on the Königsstädtische Theater).
  • Hans-Rüdiger Merten: Forgotten theaters in old Berlin. A search for clues . Trafo-Verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-89626-599-7 .
  • CT Ottmer: Architectural Communications . First section: The Königstädt'sche Schauspielhaus zu Berlin, in ten drawings, with explanatory text, with a special reference to the spectatorium, which was built amphitheatrically according to eccentric circles . Vieweg, Braunschweig 1830 (20 pages of text, 10 plates; can be viewed in the reading room of the library of the Deutsches Museum in Munich , call number: 3000/1982 B 296).
  • A new temple of happiness . In: The Gazebo . Issue 52, 1864, pp. 820-822 ( full text [ Wikisource ]).
  • Ruth Freydank: This is where Nante was born. History of the royal city theater . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 10, 1998, ISSN  0944-5560 , p. 4–15 ( luise-berlin.de ).

Web links

Commons : Königsstädtisches Theater  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

References and comments

  1. Michael Sachs: 'Prince Bishop and Vagabond'. The story of a friendship between the Prince-Bishop of Breslau Heinrich Förster (1799–1881) and the writer and actor Karl von Holtei (1798–1880). Edited textually based on the original Holteis manuscript. In: Medical historical messages. Journal for the history of science and specialist prose research. Volume 35, 2016 (2018), pp. 223–291, here: pp. 280–282.
  2. ^ Copenhagen 1843. German by Günther Jungbluth. dtv, Munich 2005, p. 372 f.
  3. The old (above, to the right of the darkly drawn Residenz Theater) and the new Wallner Theater (referred to here as the Schiller Theater)
  4. a b Blumenstr. 9b> Wallner, director . In: Allgemeiner Wohnungs-Anzeiger together with address and business manual for Berlin , 1860, III, p. 14.
  5. ^ Wallner Theater . In: Berliner Adreßbuch , 1878, part 6 (prices and seating plan, entries 8 and 9).
  6. Before the Viennese Theodor Herzl founded the “Jewish State”, he wanted to become a great playwright. He made his debut in Berlin . In: Berliner Zeitung , July 3, 2004.
  7. Karsten Schilling: The Destroyed Legacy. Berlin newspapers of the Weimar Republic in portrait , Norderstedt 2011, p. 106, note 162.
  8. ^ Ludwig Eisenberg : Königsstädtisches Theater . In: Large biographical lexicon of the German stage in the XIX. Century. Paul List, Leipzig 1903, p. 635 ( daten.digitale-sammlungen.de ).
  9. Ludwig Eisenberg : 28 . In: Large biographical lexicon of the German stage in the XIX. Century. Paul List, Leipzig 1903 ( daten.digitale-sammlungen.de ).

Coordinates: 52 ° 31 ′ 13.5 ″  N , 13 ° 24 ′ 55.3 ″  E