Rose Theater

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Seating plan (1908)

The Rose Theater was a private theater in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain in the Große Frankfurter Straße 132 (today: Karl-Marx-Allee  78-84), which was played under changing names from 1877 to 1944. When it was founded, the stage was called the Ostend-Theater and carried this name with interruptions until 1898. In the meantime, it has been given the names of Volkstheater and Nationaltheater . From 1898 the stage was called the Carl-Weiß-Theater . In 1906 the theater was taken over by Bernhard Rose and received its final name.

history

Precursor stages

Samst, Lilienthal and Öser taking the oath, 1892
Postcard from the Carl Weiss Theater , used in 1901

The building was built in 1877 as the Ostend Theater and opened under the direction of Hermann Grünfeld and Arnold Lüders on December 25, 1877 with King Lear and Maria Stuart . Depending on how it was expanded, the building held between 1,200 and 1,800 spectators, who were spread over the garden and main stages. The repertoire should suit the taste of the middle and small bourgeoisie. Classics, operettas and sensational pieces were played, such as dramatized newspaper novels. Bourgeois visitors, previously used to the classic performances of the Royal Theater, were irritated by the new theater. The writer Wilhelm Meyer-Förster later recalled:

“You saw 'Maria Stuart' there, went into the garden during the long break, where you drove a carousel, saw another act of 'Maria Stuart', went back into the garden to shoot the target, finally saw Mortimer die and then ate his supper in the garden. "

- Wilhelm Meyer-Förster : From the desk and from the studio. On the Rhinow Mountains. A memory of Otto Lilienthal.

In the early years, the operators and the repertoire changed frequently. Eugen Rosenstiel replaced Lüders in 1879. The theater was legally closed in early 1882 due to over-indebtedness. Grünfeld had to resign as director. Emil Hahn (1882–1883), Paul Strewe (1883–1886), August Kurz (1886–1887), Louis Clausius with co-director Hans Schwark (1887–1888) and Fritz Witte-Wild (1888–1889) followed as directors who briefly renamed the theater Volkstheater . Long-term economic success was denied to all operators. The theater was popularly known as the financial “mass grave of the Far East”.

Gustav Girod acquired the building and the land in 1889. The young committed actor Max Samst took over the position of director. Samst began in May 1890 in the tradition of the house with the Kolportagestück Der Scharfrichter von Berlin with the former Berlin executioner Julius Krauts in the leading role. Then Samst managed to hire the most famous actor of the time, Josef Kainz . After a legal dispute with the director of the Berlin theater Ludwig Barnay , all the theaters of the German stage association Kainz boycotted . Samst did not belong to this association, however, and so Kainz appeared in classic roles at the Ostend Theater from May to September 1890 and caused sold-out performances. The abilities of the actors acting alongside Kainz dropped so much that the Vossische Zeitung blasphemed that only “the lack of physical strength” had led them to “choose the profession of mime over the more lucrative porter”. In autumn 1890 the house became the venue of the Freie Volksbühne , which opened its program with Henrik Ibsen's supporters from society and also performed the captain's drama Die Weber , which was banned in Prussia . The aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal supported Samst from 1892, where he appeared as a patron and actor in the theater until his death in 1896 . Together with the actor Richard Oeser, the two converted the stage into a popular theater for the working class called the Nationaltheater (“Ten Pfennig Theater”). Since this income could not cover the costs, Samst tried to fill the house with concerts, children's parties, fairground attractions and wrestling events. When Lilienthal died in 1896 and there was no state support for the project, Samst had to give up.

In 1895 the comedian Carl Weiß bought the National Theater and initially had it renovated. It reopened in September 1896 with the performance of the popular play Der deutsche Michel by Rudolf Kneisel . Weiß had renamed the cultural institution the Ostend Theater . In 1898, Weiß celebrated its 30th stage anniversary. On the occasion of his silver wedding anniversary , Weiss renamed the house the Carl Weiss Theater in the same year . Weiß was successful with light theater plays for many years, but ran into economic difficulties after the turn of the century and finally sold the theater in 1906.

Berlin memorial plaque at Karl-Marx-Allee 78

1906-1945

View of the stage in the Rose Theater, around 1910

The Bernhard Rose Theater had existed in the garden of the German Clubhouse at Badstrasse  58 ( Berlin-Gesundbrunnen ) since 1901 . In 1906, Bernhard Rose took over the Carl-Weiß-Theater , initially also calling it the Bernhard-Rose-Theater, and from September 1909 shortened the name to Rose-Theater .

Rose opened the house on September 29, 1906 with Max Kretzer's play The Millionaire Farmer . Rose mainly showed pieces in the tradition of the Berlin Volkstheater, with which he successfully addressed the proletarian - petty-bourgeois audience in East Berlin. After Bernhard Rose's death in 1927, the three sons Hans Rose (1893–1980), Paul Rose (1900–1973) and Willi Rose (1902–1978) continued to run the theater. Actors who were engaged at the Rose Theater either continuously or for longer periods of time, in addition to the Rose brothers, Paul Albert Glaeser-Wilken (1874–1942), Georg August Koch (1883–1963), Ferdinand Asper (1895–1950), Traute Rose ( 1904–1997), Loni Pyrmont and Ilse Vollborn (1911–1974).

A chapter in the history of the Rose Theater that has not yet been explored is the guest performances by well-known actors. Under Paul Rose, Guido Thielscher (1859–1941), Josefine Dora (1867–1944), Eduard von Winterstein (1871–1961), Irene Triesch (1875–1964), Claire Waldoff (1884–1957), Ida Orloff (1889 –1945), Agnes Straub (1890–1941), Gustaf Gründgens (1899–1963), Margarete Melzer (1907–1959), Toni van Eyck (1910–1988), Rotraut Richter (1915–1947) and others. a. m. on.

During the Second World War , the garden stage was destroyed in November 1943. On August 31, 1944, the Rose Theater gave its last performance with Franz Lehár's operetta Friederike . It was then converted into a cinema , which opened on October 27, 1944 with the film The Court Concert by Paul Verhoeven . The cinema was open until March 1945. In the Battle of Berlin the building was destroyed in house-to-house fighting . During the removal of the rubble and the subsequent redevelopment of the then Stalinallee , all structural remains of the theater of the common people, which had existed for almost 70 years, disappeared.

literature

  • Edith Krull, Hans Rose: Memories of the Rose Theater. Henschel, Berlin 1960.
  • Heinz Dieter Heinrichs The Rose Theater . Colloquium Verlag, Berlin / West 1965.
  • Werner Dopp: That was Rose for Berlin - according to Paul Rose's notes . In: Der Tagesspiegel , October 23, 1966.
  • Michael Baumgarten, Ruth Freydank: The Rose Theater. A people's theater in East Berlin from 1906–1944. Edited by Märkisches Museum Berlin. Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-89468-020-2 .

Web links

Commons : Rose Theater  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b The East of Berlin. Berlin 1930, p. 262.
  2. ^ A b Nic Leonhardt: Pictorial dramaturgy. Visual culture and theater in the 19th century (1869–1899). Bielefeld 2007, p. 331 f.
  3. ↑ a b Gerhard Wahnrau: Berlin - city of theater. The chronicle 1st part. Berlin 1957, pp. 531-534, 563.
  4. ^ Ruth Freydank : Theater in Berlin. From the beginning until 1945. Berlin 1988, p. 291.
  5. ↑ In: Velhagen & Klasings Monatshefte 24 (1909/1910), Issue 12 (August 1910), pp. 544-548, quoted on p. 544.
  6. ↑ a b c Manuela Runge , Bernd Lukasch : Inventor's life. The brothers Otto and Gustav Lilienthal. Berlin 2005, pp. 193-213.
  7. ↑ Erika Schachinger: Käthe Schmidt-Jürgensen (1897–1979). A Berlin artist's fate. In: Mitteilungen des Verein für die Geschichte Berlins 76 (1980), pp. 144–149 ( PDF , accessed on January 29, 2014).
  8. ^ Judith Eisermann: Josef Kainz. Between tradition and modernity. The path of an epochal actor. Munich 2010, pp. 155–162; Matthias Nöther: Josef Kainz. The beating heart. In: Der Tagesspiegel , December 30, 2007; accessed on January 30, 2014.
  9. ^ New Theater-Almanach 3 (1892), pp. 17, 189 f.
  10. ^ Ludwig Eisenberg: Large biographical lexicon of the German stage in the XIX. Century. Leipzig 1903, p. 1107; German Theater Lexicon. Vol. 6, fascicle 32/33: Weisbrod-Wiel. Berlin 2012, p. 3151; New Theater Almanac 7 (1896) - 17 (1906).
  11. ↑ Michael Baumgarten, Ruth Freydank: Das Rose Theater. A people's theater in East Berlin from 1906–1944. Berlin 1991, pp. 12-18.
  12. ^ The Rose Theater in the district lexicon of Edition Luisenstadt

Coordinates: 52 ° 31 ′ 1.6 ″  N , 13 ° 26 ′ 16.4 ″  E