Central (Lübeck)
The Zentral was a Lübeck cinema .
history
Karl Mest (* 1894; † 1974), the eldest son of the Magdeburg cinema entrepreneur Artur Mest and trained photographer , initially headed three of his father's Magdeburg cinemas after the First World War before moving to Lübeck in 1919, where his divorced mother Johanna Mest had been since Lived in 1915 and ran the Neue Lichtspiel-Theater together with his two younger brothers .
Karl Mest acquired the Monopol company building at Johannisstraße 25 (today Dr.-Julius-Leber-Straße 25 ) and converted the former dance hall into a cinema hall with 550 seats. The new movie theater was opened on November 28, 1919. The rather modest cinema enjoyed great popularity with the Lübeck audience in the decades that followed, although it had to do without spectacular equipment or premieres.
In 1930, attempts were made in Central not to present anything new in the West.
In the 1930s , Karl Mest temporarily ceded the Zentral to his father's Kammerlichtspiele GmbH; Under what circumstances and for how long can no longer be said, since the business documents were destroyed in the Second World War . The cinema itself survived the war unscathed and was not requisitioned by the British occupying forces , so that operations were resumed on August 14, 1945 by Karl Mest and his son Artur. From 1946 on, the cinema also served as a stage for the Metropol- Varieté , which, however, was dissolved after a lost legal dispute and gave its last performance on September 30, 1948, so that the Zentral was once again exclusively a cinema .
In the post-war years, Karl Mest specialized in showing adventure films , westerns and action films . The city center was in direct competition with the City , which opened in 1951 and had a more favorable location on Königstrasse .
After Karl Mests death, his son Artur and his grandsons Andreas and Michael continued the company. From 1978 to 1986 the Zentral was the venue for the annual retrospective as part of the Nordic Film Days . Regular cinema operations were discontinued in June 1985; Film screenings only took place on special occasions such as events organized by the Lübeck Office for Culture. At the beginning of the 1990s, Arthaus performances regularly took place in the Zentral, which were organized by Kötzschenbroda partner companies.
With the opening of the new town hall as a multi-room cinema, the central was given up as a venue. The bankruptcy of Mests in 1995 was the final end, a sale to interested parties from Hamburg who wanted to continue operating the property as a film art theater with a stage and gastronomy failed because of the Kiefts' objection, because they still had a lease that lasted several years. They would continue this, competition, also in the Arthaus area, was not desired and would be prevented by all means. The cinema venue was thus finally given up. After being used as an art gallery and market hall for high demands, the former cinema house has housed the Geisler Volkstheater since October 3, 2002 , which shows film classics once a month in addition to theater performances.
See also
literature
- Petra Schaper: Cinemas in Lübeck . Verlag Graphische Werkstätten GmbH, Lübeck 1987. ISBN 3-925402-35-7
Coordinates: 53 ° 52 ′ 3.98 " N , 10 ° 41 ′ 21.75" E