Theater house Jena

Theaterhaus Jena, 2010

Art object on the theater forecourt

The Theaterhaus Jena is the theater of the city of Jena .

History until 1989

1408–1871 acting in Jena

Theaters were already being played in Jena in the Middle Ages. In addition to traveling artists, it was above all monasteries and churches that offered mystery plays, passion and Christmas plays, for example the Carmelite monastery, which stood on today's Engelplatz until 1655.

Under the Weimar-Saxon rule, theater in Jena was subject to approval. The lively Jena theater makers obviously overwhelmed the Weimar authorities with their many applications, so that in 1800 they completely forbade theater in Jena. As a result, the people of Jena constantly evaded this ban. They played all over the city: in the town hall, the rose halls, in tavern halls, in the ballroom and also in the large dance hall of the “Zum Goldenen Engel” inn.

From a theatrical point of view, Jena was a contradicting city at that time: On the one hand, Friedrich Schiller wrote some of his world-famous dramas in his garden house in today's Schillergässchen (e.g. Maria Stuart , Wallenstein or The Maiden of Orleans ). But his dramas did not premier in Jena, but for example in Weimar, where - as in the other royal cities ( Gera , Rudolstadt , Naumburg, etc.) - the local princes and dukes at the turn of the 19th century had magnificent theaters had built. Jena, on the other hand, got its theater as part of a private initiative: the landlord, beer brewer and theater lover, Kommerzienrat Carl Köhler built it in 1872 on the back yard of his inn "Zum Goldenen Engel".

1872–1900 The Köhler'sche Theater

The "Köhler'sche Etablissement" - that's how the private theater was called from now on - offered space for 800 spectators. It became, at least in the beginning, an artistic success story. Köhler engaged traveling ensembles, who performed their program from October to New Year. The rest of the year he rented the theater to private initiatives and associations. This meant that the theater was not only at the cutting edge of its time artistically: it could be political and topical, regardless of the mandate of an aristocratic court. Economically, however, the theater could hardly support itself, as the theater-loving audience in Jena took the newly built railroad mainly to Weimar to the Weimar court theater . Although Köhler tried to make his garden theater more attractive with renovations in 1886, he had to compensate for the losses of the house again and again with surpluses from his brewery and the Engel-Gasthof. In the end, he was forced to sell his property to the municipality.

1900–1921 City Theater Jena

In May 1900, Köhler's entire complex, including the “Golden Angel” and theater, was acquired by the Jena City Council. Although they failed to completely renovate the house, they still hoped to make a profit from leasing it to various theater entrepreneurs. Between 1900 and 1921 a total of 11 directors tried each other, who had to adapt their initially ambitious artistic programs again and again to the broader public tastes in order not to fail economically. The theater building deteriorated during this time, so that around 1911 more and more educated citizens campaigned for a conversion or even a new construction of the theater. Despite various initiatives and a massive amount of donations, however, it was not possible to steer this project on a secure path before the First World War . After the World War, a non-profit theater company was founded, which regularly appointed new theater directors. A structural solution was initially unthinkable given the tight budgets. Rather, they thought aggressively about merging with other Thuringian theaters and contacted the German National Theater in Weimar. Until recently, the Jena theater director Alfred Horsten resisted being taken over by the Weimar National Theater. It was not to be successful: in 1921 the Jena theater was finally bankrupt and technically and structurally as good as unplayable.

1921–1945 The Gropius Theater

In April 1921, the Weimar National Theater took over the Köhler'sche Theater as a secondary or outdoor venue. However, the condition for the takeover was the fundamental renovation of the ailing theater building. The Weimarers favored the newly elected Bauhaus director Walter Gropius ; the Jenaer and their city planning director Oskar Bandtlow had to bow to this decision. After a six-month dispute over responsibilities and competencies, the renovation work finally began. For reasons of cost, the old stage was not affected by the extensive structural changes. Gropius was primarily responsible for the publicly accessible areas of the theater and its development towards the city: The redesign focused on the route through the "Golden Angel" to the theater, on the interior design of the audience (auditorium, ticket office, foyer, cloakroom, he paid special attention to the color scheme) and above all to a new facade. When the theater reopened on September 24, 1922, the Jenaische Zeitung wrote :

“Jena has a theater. That means a turning point in the spiritual life of this city! "

The repertoire of the following years, on the other hand, left a lot to be desired: The Weimar National Theater saw itself less and less able to provide high quality performance to the theater in Jena due to insufficient funding. In the meantime, Jena was even played by the theater ensembles from Gotha , Meiningen and Altenburg . In addition, the government of the newly formed state of Thuringia and the municipalities argued over financial responsibility for the Thuringian theaters. In 1929 the Weimar theater director Franz Ulbrich was finally appointed general manager of all Thuringian theaters. He was confronted with the thankless task of enforcing massive theater and / or branch closings.

During the time of National Socialism , cultural life in Jena was brought into line: the various visitor organizations were broken up and brought together to form the so-called “cultural community”; In the Jena theater, "racially pure" plays and propaganda events were given. In the winter of 1944 the theater was closed like everyone else in Germany, but ultimately survived the bombing war without any major damage.

1946–1948 The Biermann Theater

Shortly after the war, the Hamburg theater impressario John Biermann leased the Jena theater. As a private entrepreneur, he had big plans: First, he introduced the three-division operation (opera, dance and spoken theater) and, with growing success, played in the two venues, Theater and Volkshaus, seven evenings a week. In addition, he had committed to rebuilding the Gropius Theater at his own expense. The extremely ambitious renovation began in 1948 and should include both the auditorium and the stage. First he raised the ceiling of the auditorium and built in side tiers to gain more seating. Then he redesigned all the spectator areas so that nothing of the Gropius interior architecture could be seen. In addition, he flattened the facade, which has now been provided with a gable, in order to be able to add a pseudo-classical porch later as a ticket hall. In this way, the last visible traces that could have been reminiscent of the Bauhaus Theater by Walter Gropius disappeared. The planned and sorely necessary renovation of the stage house and the extension of the ticket hall could no longer be tackled because Biermann was bankrupt in 1949.

The next few years were marked by declining audience numbers and intense disputes about the situation of the theater: The artists were confronted with makeshift arrangements that made regular play almost impossible. The stage was still in a ruinous condition; the building police repeatedly threatened to close the house; In 1950, the National Theater Weimar took over the Jena Theater again. The post-war ensemble was dismissed and the urgently needed renovation of the stage was initiated. In the period that followed, the Jena Theater did not produce any more independent productions. A technically completely redesigned stage should make it possible to take over the productions from Weimar directly. An iron curtain and a revolving stage were built into the theater for the first time. The technical renovation was not completed until 1956 and the Jena theater was reopened. Most of the other structural areas were only dealt with provisionally.

1956–1989 The Jena Theater in the GDR

Up until the 1960s, the theater became a permanent venue for the Weimar theater under the name “DNT Weimar, Haus Jena”. After 1964, in addition to the National Theater in Weimar, there were again guest productions from Gera , Altenburg , Eisenach , Rudolstadt and Erfurt . The Jena City Theater was now formally an independent theater again, but still did not have its own ensemble. The few unique selling points of the theater were limited to annually guest jazz concerts (as part of the festivals “Jazz im Paradies” and “Jenaer Jazztage”). The plans for the large-scale GDR urban development program of 1968 (which is still mainly reflected in the JenTower and the Neu-Lobeda prefabricated housing estate) did not provide any new impulses for the theater to be taken seriously.

Instead, the city theater was kept from closing with new patches. In 1977 a structural engineer recognized that the slowly but surely tearing apart and dampening walls could not withstand the enormous load of the wide roof structure from Biermann's time. Thanks to a special permit, the theater could still be used until the end of 1986.

As early as 1985, a group of architects and engineers, in cooperation with the theater management, proposed a “reconstruction plan” for the theater: The theater was to be extended by 16 meters to the front in order to create a completely new, somewhat smaller auditorium that would be wider Foyer and through a glass-steel facade to the city. In the basement, the theater was to contain a modern studio stage and a wine bar, including the underground vaults of the old Carmelite monastery; and it should be renamed "Schillertheater". The political bodies were enthusiastic - the theater was last shown on New Year's Eve 1986/1987, and the demolition of the old auditorium began on January 2nd. But as early as February 1987 construction work stalled. The officially approved construction plan could never be financed in the following years, not even an architect could be entrusted with the qualified elaboration, let alone a construction company with the concrete implementation.

1987 to the present day: Construction of the Jena theater

From 1987 until the reunification in 1990, the theater remained closed by the building authorities and became increasingly dilapidated. The city administration used the rooms as a warehouse; the forecourt was fenced in with boards. Theater was played in the nearby Capitol Cinema . It was not until the spring of 1990 that a Gera production opened the “theater on the backstage”. Accompanied by intensive discussions about the future of the Jena theater, the theater staff used the ruins in the meantime and showed cabaret, cabaret and small chamber plays in front of a hundred old cinema seats.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ines Eck planned an author's theater in Jena, in which playwrights determine directors and actors as theater directors, and she convinced Friedensreich Hundertwasser to expand the theater stump. Head of Culture, Klaus Hattenbach, canceled Hundertwasser and created an ensemble of ABM positions. The new artistic director around Horst-J opened on November 29, 1991 under the season's motto "DesertGegenZeit". Lonius and Sven Schlötcke run the Jena Theater House with a 10-person theater ensemble. Jena's theater no longer had an auditorium, but it finally had its own ensemble again after more than 40 years. The games continued on the poorly prepared large stage, but also in other rooms of the old stage house. Under the new logo of the angry theater angel (contributed by the Berlin graphic artist Henning Wagenbreth) the ensemble worked with a comparatively lean administration, flat hierarchies and a minimal budget. It saw itself as a research laboratory for contemporary theater structures and a new theater language.

“We are doing a kind of special theater for this building and this city, for a broad audience who are looking for an artist experience outside of the rushed media world. I would even speak of an unmistakable Jena theater style. "( Sven Schlötcke )

But the future of this model was far from clear. Various utopian drafts and rumors (including a renewed takeover of the Jena theater by the National Theater Weimar ) were followed in 1992 by a political coordination between two development concepts for the Jena theater: the head of the cultural office, Norbert Reif, was considering using it as a platform and nationwide open stage for cooperation projects within the framework of a jena-wide "Kulturmanagement GmbH" before (analogous to today's own operation JenaKultur); Sven Schlötcke's team, on the other hand, suggested a further temporary use of the existing ruin under its own sponsorship and based itself on the model of the early Schaubühne or the Theater an der Ruhr in Mülheim. With massive support from the Jena population and supraregional experts (including Heiner Müller and Frank Castorf ), the second proposal finally prevailed. In July 1993 the Theaterhaus Jena gGmbH was founded, which is financed in equal parts from grants from the state and the city. The special thing about the choice of this legal form: All 13 shareholders were employees of the company. Since then, the shareholders have appointed two rotating managing directors.

Functional extension of the Jena theater, 2019

In dealing with the structural situation, Theaterhaus gGmbH has consistently followed a three-pronged strategy since it was founded: a so-called functional extension with rehearsal stage, storage, sanitary and workshop rooms was planned in the backyard and inaugurated on September 10, 2014 after a two-year construction period; the stage tower will continue to be used as a venue after its fundamental renovation in 1999 and will be gradually improved technically; The forecourt, which was renovated in 2006 and 2007, is enlivened with the summer spectacle that has been taking place annually for the opening of the Jena Cultural Arena since 1997 and other temporary activities: With ideas competitions (e.g. together with the Bauhaus University Weimar), temporary festivals and performances, it was possible to To preserve this urban open space in spite of different plans for cultural activities.

Seasons since 1996

The seasons 1996/97, 1997/98, 1998/99 were based on thematic theater work. In these three seasons in particular, theater was seen as a cross-genre art and communication space. In addition to theater projects, which were largely developed independently of a finished piece, the work also included exhibitions, concerts, interdisciplinary discussion forums, performances and festivals.

From September 1998 to April 1999 the ruined theater house was subjected to an urgently needed renovation. During the renovation, the ensemble acquired new venues in and around Jena. Paparazzi was played in the Goethe Galerie shopping center , the Jo-Fabian production tactics for evolution in the former E-Werk in Weimar, the short operas Der Kaiser von Atlantis by Viktor Ullmann and Brundibár in the St. Michael church, the radio play evening hour in late autumn in the arthouse cinema "Schillerhof".

In December 1998 there was a break between the shareholders' meeting of the theater house and the artistic management of the house due to differences of opinion.

The 1999/2000 season saw the next upheaval: in January 2000, a new artistic director of the theater opened to the public. Claudia Bauer's team focused primarily on the screening and promotion of young artists. As a result, the theater became a well-known talent factory for young writers and directors as well as young actors. With the double premiere of Woyzeck / Baal , they started playing at the Theaterhaus Jena on January 13, 2000. Since then, 16 productions have been created under the season mottos Offender (2000 season) and Paths to Paradise (2000/01 season) (see also reviews and pictures). In the 11th season of its existence, the Theaterhaus Jena started with the trend-setting slogan "Triumph der Provinz". Also in this season was the youth theater club at Theaterhaus Jena, founded in October 2000, which complemented the program of the house with its productions by young people for young people in a meaningful and exciting way.

In 2002/03, Sabine Westermaier (dramaturge), Rainald Grebe (dramaturge) and Claudia Bauer (lead director) constituted a new artistic director under the motto “Bastard Germany. Local research in the third millennium ”started in the next two seasons. During this era, intensive cooperation activities developed (the Theaterhaus has since worked regularly with festivals and venues in the independent scene) and a number of youth formats (including the founding of the youth club, which still exists today). In particular, the 2003/04 season, which partly took place in the drained public bath due to the renovation of the electrotechnical systems of the parent company, proved to be the most successful of this artistic team's time. In December 2002, the operator GmbH decided on the next complete change in artistic direction for the 2004/05 season. The last production under the direction of Bauer, Grebe, Westermaier was Shakespeare's Midsummer Night 's Dream for the opening of the Kulturarena Jena in 2004.

From summer 2004 Markus Heinzelmann (head director) and Marcel Klett (head dramaturge) directed the artistic fortunes of the theater. In addition to the further expansion of network work and the increased use of external venues, they shaped the theater primarily by promoting young artists, for example by awarding writing assignments to young authors. The participation of the Theaterhaus in the awarding of the Jakob-Michael-Reinhold-Lenz Prize for Drama should also be seen in this context . In addition, under the direction of Markus Heinzelmann, the educational theater offers for children were expanded. The completely new ensemble with eight actors started the 2004/05 season on October 28, 2004 under the motto “Welcome to the Wild West”. The motto of the 2005/06 season was “I'm fighting!” And the 2007/2008 season was themed “Brave New World”. The 2008/2009 season had the theme “Free Body Cultures” and the 2009/2010 season “Last Exit Paradise”. 2010/2011 was the last season of the artistic direction under Heinzelmann and is under the motto "My home is not your Castle".

At the beginning of the 2011/2012 season, Veronika Bleffert, Jonas Zipf and Benjamin and Moritz Schönecker became the fourth artistic director since the theater was re-established. With the 2013/2014 season Jonas Zipf left again, but Friederike Weidner (dramaturgy) and Marcel Klett (managing director) were accepted into the artistic direction.

literature

• Bahnert / Kerber: Simplicity & Lust & Freedom - Theater between the wild and urban institution . In: Theater der Zeit, Recherche 90. Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-942449-30-4 .
• Ulrich Müller: Walter Gropius. The Jena Theater . In: Minerva - Jenaer Schriften zur Kunstgeschichte , Volume 15, Jena / Cologne 2006. ISBN 978-3-86560-148-3 .

Web links

Commons : Theaterhaus Jena  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Theater house Jena

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Barbara Glasser: New functional building handed over to the theater in Jena. Retrieved October 28, 2019 . 

Coordinates: 50 ° 55 ′ 31.5 ″  N , 11 ° 35 ′ 1 ″  E