Ufa-Palast am Zoo

The Ufa-Palast am Zoo on Auguste-Viktoria-Platz, now Breitscheidplatz, in Charlottenburg, was a major Berlin cinema owned by Universum Film AG, or Ufa. Opened in 1919 and enlarged in 1925, it was the largest cinema in Germany until 1929 and was one of the main locations of film premières in the country. It was destroyed in 1943 during the Second World War and replaced in 1957 by the Zoo Palast.

The Romanesque-style building at Hardenbergstraße 29 was designed as an exhibition space by Carl Gause, one of the architects of the Hotel Adlon, and called the Ausstellungshallen am Zoologischen Garten after the adjacent Berlin Zoo. In 1912, Arthur Biberfeld converted the western section into a theatre. In 1913–15, projection facilities were installed by Oskar Kaufmann for the première of the film Quo Vadis, produced by the Italian Cines company, and from 1913 to 1914, the theatre was called the Cines-Palast. The other section of the building housed a café and variety theatre called the Wilhelmshallen.

In 1919, architect Max Bischoff rebuilt it for Ufa as a 1,740-seat cinema, which opened on 18 September 1919 with the première of Ernst Lubitsch's Madame Dubarry. The cinema had a rectangular auditorium with two levels of proscenium boxes and the remaining seating arranged in horseshoe-shaped rows.Siegfried Kracauer praised the sightlines from the amphitheatre-style seating and the "discreet" and "tasteful" colour scheme; the décor was simple, with faïence panels around the screen.

In 1925, the cinema was rebuilt by Carl Stahl-Urach; it was enlarged to 2,165 seats by the addition of a balcony, the lighting was improved, and an illuminated cinema organ was added. The interior décor by Samuel Rachman resembled that of Broadway cinemas. It was the largest cinema in Germany until the 1929 opening of the Ufa-Palast in Hamburg, which was at that time the largest in Europe.

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