Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz

The Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz is a famous theatre in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin, located on the Kurfürstendamm boulevard. It is a conversion of the Universum cinema, built according to plans designed by Erich Mendelsohn in 1928.

The cinema then was the centrepiece of the wider WOGA housing complex, designed by Mendelsohn in a New Objectivity styled urban development ensemble, with a shopping walkway, apartment blocks, lawns, and a tennis court in the back. It possibly was the first Modernist cinema built in the world, as opposed to the Moorish, Egyptian and baroque styles that predominated. Mendelsohn wrote a short text on his cinema, declaring 'no Baroque palaces for Buster Keaton'. The cinema would become very influential on Streamline Moderne cinema design in the 1930s.

Heavily damaged in World War II, it was rebuilt and re-opened as a cinema, from 1969 as a dance hall and for musical theatre. The building's current use as a lyric style theatre dates from the late 1970s, when the Schaubühne ensemble around Peter Stein, formerly residing on Hallesches Ufer in Kreuzberg, searched for a new venue. From 1978 to 1981 the interiors have been completely changed, centered on a theatre hall with adjustable spaces and no separation of audience and performers.

The Schaubühne ensemble itself was founded in 1962, it became the domain of Peter Stein in 1970. Stein had sparked a theatre scandal in Munich, where he had staged Peter Weiss' Viet Nam Diskurs, by collecting money among the theatre-goers in order to support the Viet Cong. Strongly influenced by the Protests of 1968 and the German student movement, already his first production of Brecht's The Mother starring Therese Giehse immediately earned fierce protests by conservative West Berlin politicians, who spoke of "communist agitation". The next year the ensemble received the Deutscher Kritikerpreis award for the performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt. In the following years, the Schaubühne directed by Stein and his dramaturgical assistant Botho Strauß became one of the leading theatre stages in Germany.

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