Roxy Palace

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The Roxy Palace in Berlin-Friedenau

The Roxy Palace was completed in 1929 as a cinema and office building at Hauptstrasse 78/79 in the Berlin district of Friedenau in what was then the Schöneberg district . The building, designed by Martin Punitzer in the New Objectivity style, has been a listed building since 1988 . In 1986, three people were killed in the building when the La Belle nightclub was bombed .

Location, building history and architecture

Notice board at the side entrance of the Roxy Palace

The building was constructed as an office and commercial building with an integrated movie theater in steel frame construction. The client was the Berliner Bau- und Terrain AG , the design was provided by the architect Martin Punitzer (1889–1949), who was later persecuted as a Jew by the National Socialists and emigrated to Chile .

Location of the Roxy Palace with the Friedenau town hall

The building is located at the southwest end of the main street , just before it turns into Rheinstraße at Breslauer Platz . The main street runs diagonally from northeast to southwest, while the two side streets of the main street that demarcate the block of the Roxy Palace - Stierstrasse and Lauterstrasse - lead north. As a result, the property of the Roxy Palace has the shape of a right-angled trapezoid . The boundaries of the property to the neighboring buildings form the (parallel) base sides of the trapezoid: north to house number 77, a commercial building, and southwest to the Friedenau town hall . The (non-parallel) legs of the trapezoid form the front and rear of the property: the shorter, right-angled leg borders the front of the main street, while the longer leg forms the rear boundary to the perimeter block development on Lauterstraße.

The property is around 59 meters wide facing the main road  , while the back is around 73 meters wide due to the trapezoidal shape. On the narrow side - on the left in front of it, towards the Friedenau town hall - the property is 20 meters deep, while on the broad side - on the right in front of it, towards the neighboring building to the north - it is almost 63 m deep. On this unfavorably cut plot of land, Punitzer designed a four-storey block building 59 m wide and 14 m deep that spanned the foyer of the cinema in the northern part. The cinema itself extends into the deeper part of the trapezoidal property.

The office building is a three-tier steel frame building with two staircases, one at the north and one at the south end. The Lauterbach department store was housed in the southern part of the ground floor , later this area was divided into shops and then used as a discotheque (see: La Belle ). The building has three office floors above the department store area and only two above the higher cinema room. The cinema had a large parquet with 24 rows of seats and up to 28 seats per row, nine two-seater parquet boxes, an orchestra pit for silent films and a tier. The cinema had a total of 1106 seats.

Ribbon windows of the Roxy Palace

The street facade of the Roxy Palace is designed on the upper floors with elongated, continuous ribbon windows that are only interrupted by the windows of the northern stairwell. The architect's idea was to symbolize several strips of film with the ribbon windows. The first floor was completely glazed and accommodated shop windows and glass doors in the department store section. Above the entrance to the cinema was a vertical pylon with an abstract advertising surface made of colored glass.

Usage history and conversions

The cinema opened on October 31, 1929 at 9 p.m. with the Berlin premiere of the silent film Andreas Hofer , which was shot with the support of the Tyrolean state government. Guests of honor at the opening were the State Secretary in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior Wilhelm Abegg , Police Vice President Bernhard Weiß , Colonel of the Hellriegel Police and the Mayor of Friedenau. The cinema director presented the planned program of the house in his opening speech as follows: “Unfortunately, it will be impossible for us to always bring the best films. We Germans want to see German films, but we poor Germans don't have the money, that's why ... ”In the KPD newspaper Die Rote Fahne , a reviewer described the shown film Andreas Hofer as“ [German] national crap, in every respect ”, and, using the social fascism thesis, constructed a connection between the presence of SPD and police representatives at the premiere and the putsch preparations of the Heimwehr, allegedly supported by the Schober government in Austria .

Former cinema entrance
Memorial plaque in Hauptstrasse 78

Across from the Roxy Palace, a six- to seven-storey Hertie department store designed by the architect Johann Emil Schaudt in the New Objectivity style was to be built around 1930 on the corner of Fregestraße as a "gateway" to the newly built residential complexes on Rubensstraße and the Cecilien Gardens . However, the construction never got beyond the planning phase.

In 1931, the Berlin address book at Hauptstrasse 78/79 listed two advertising agencies (including Deutsche Eisenbahn-Reklame GmbH ), a sales office for Ceresit (at the time a product of Wunner'sche Bitumenwerke GmbH in Unna ) as tenants of the building next to the Roxy-Palast cinema , today Henkel ), a specialist and the Berlin branch of Groß-Ziethener Kies- und Sandwerk GmbH .

The building, which was partially destroyed in World War II, was rebuilt in 1951 according to plans by the Stuttgart architect Paul Stohrer together with Bruno Meltendorf . The number of seats was reduced from the original 1106 to 998.

In the post-war period, there was no suitable concert hall in Berlin . Like other large film palaces that were preserved during the war, the Roxy Palace was equipped for performances of concerts. “An orchestra room for 40 musicians was built into the representative 1000-seat Roxy theater in Berlin-Friedenau, which belongs to the cinema group of the theater owner Hugo Lembke. The good acoustics of the house surprised when the artists' emergency service performed Figaro's wedding for the inauguration . In addition, the ticket offices were modernized based on ideas from the theater manager Unger. Clever use of space and streamlined interior design accelerate ticket sales and make the cashiers' work easier. The card cabinets were combined for set and role cards. "

The writer Uwe Johnson , who was in New York at the time, rented a business space in the building barely 400 m away in 1967 after he lost his studio in the nearby Niedstrasse 14 to store the parts of his documents that had been rescued. After his return to Berlin, Johnson used the room above the Roxy Palace from September 1968 to September 1974 as a “writing room” and wrote large parts of his main work Anniversaries there .

The cinema closed in the mid-1970s. After a temporary use as an event location (including live music), the discotheque “La Belle” opened on the former department store area - not in the cinema - in which three people died and 28 were seriously injured in a 1986 bomb attack.

The discotheque was no longer operated after the attack.

The original facade design was restored in 1987, and a carpet shop belonging to the Gota retail chain moved into the cinema, which closed again in 2009. The shops on the left in front of it are still rented.

After more than a year of renovation, an organic food market opened in June 2011 in the entrance area and on the parquet floor of the former cinema hall .

In April 2018 the artist group Momenta will be exhibiting works by five artists in the rooms of the former shop for a month.

literature

  • Peter Boeger: Architecture of the cinema in Berlin. Buildings and projects 1919–1930 . Arenhövel, Berlin 1993. ISBN 3-922912-28-1 .
  • Sylvaine Hänsel (Ed.): Cinema architecture in Berlin 1895–1995 . Reimer, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-496-01129-7 .
  • Jürgen Lampeitl, Albert Ude, Wolf-Borwin Wendlandt: Martin Albrecht Punitzer, architect - a collage . Publishing house Albert Ude, Gelsdruck, Gelsenkirchen 1987.
  • Peter Lemburg: Monuments in Berlin - Schöneberg district, Friedenau district , 2nd edition. Arenhövel, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-922912-52-4 . Published by the Landesdenkmalamt Berlin and the Schöneberg District Office of Berlin in the series "Monument Topography Federal Republic of Germany".
  • Rolf Rave, Hans-Joachim Knöfel: Building since 1900 in Berlin . 3. Edition. Kiepert, Berlin 1981, ISBN 3-920597-02-8 .
  • Senator for Building and Housing (Ed.): 100 Berlin buildings of the Weimar Republic . Berlin 1977.

Web links

Commons : Roxy Palace  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Roxy Palace . In: Die Welt August 12, 2004.
  2. ^ Martin Albrecht Punitzer.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF) in the Berlin State Archives .@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.landesarchiv-berlin.de  
  3. ↑ Martin Punitzer: Roxy-Palast, floor plan EG 1: 100 . In: Archive of the Architecture Museum of the TU Berlin, Inv.-No .: 42007.
  4. ^ Gudrun Blankenburg: Friedenau - artist's place and idyllic living space. The history of a Berlin district . Frieling, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-8280-2350-5 .
  5. ^ Hermann Ebling (ed.): Friedenau tells - stories from a Berlin suburb (1914-1933) , Volume 2. Edition Friedenauer Brücke, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-9811242-2-4 , p. 277.
  6. ↑ Gero Gandert (Ed.): The film of the Weimar Republic. A Handbook of Contemporary Criticism. De Gruyter, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-11-015805-1 , p. 17.
  7. ↑ a b c Roxy Palace introduces itself . In: Die Rote Fahne , Berlin, No. 222/1929, November 3, 1929, p. 11.
  8. ^ Hermann Ebling (Ed.): Friedenau tells - stories from a Berlin suburb (1914-1933) , Volume 2. Edition Friedenauer Brücke, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-9811242-2-4 , p. 275.
  9. ↑ Hauptstrasse 78/79 . In: Berliner Adreßbuch , 1931, part 4, p. 1603.
  10. ↑ Die Filmwoche , issue 8/1951: “The main street in the Schöneberg district has its Roxy Palace again, which was bombed out during the war. A department store was later built here, which has now had to give way to the Lemke-Krüger management. Approximately 1000 places will be available. At the opening, a few rows of chairs were still missing (because they were not delivered on time from Stuttgart) and the smoking boxes behind glass, designed for 40 people who are fuming, had not yet been approved by the building police. Incidentally, weird trumps in our time and therefore nothing about this house - including the very idiosyncratic exterior front, which has its greater effect seen from the other side of the street - is straight. Günther Keil, Berlin's passionate cinema opener, named the new style - a joint effort by Dipl.-Ing. Arch. P. Stohrer, Stuttgart and architect B. Mellendorf, Berlin - ' Picasso ' style. The views of the visitors were quite different. Not to be denied are excellent acoustics and flawless image reproduction, although it should be noted that the screen walls continue to strive to expand. It seems to point strictly to Cinerama . In addition: built-in spotlights for stage illumination. The house, technically furnished by Ufa -Handel, Berlin, and working with Bauer B VIII projectors, opened with the film Kissing is not a sin , which was released by Adler-Film-Verleih and was received with appreciative joy. "
  11. ^ The new film , 22/1955
  12. ↑ Johnson's sister-in-law Jutta Schmidt was killed in the fire on November 12, 1967 at Niedstrasse 14, see Thomas Schmidt: Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries. A synoptic calendar . In: Johnson-Jahrbuch , No. 6/1999, ISSN  0945-9227 , p. 228. The apartment at Niedstrasse 14 had previously been the scene of the preparations for the “ pudding attack ” by the Commune I , which had quartered there without Johnson's knowledge .
  13. ↑ Bernd Neumann: Uwe Johnson . Europäische Verlags-Anstalt, Hamburg 1994, ISBN 3-434-50051-0 , p. 616.
  14. ↑ Karen Noetzel: The former Roxy Palace will be an exhibition space for a month. In: Berlin Week . April 4, 2018, accessed April 6, 2018 .

Coordinates: 52 ° 28 ′ 23.2 "  N , 13 ° 20 ′ 12.2"  E