ALL WORLD'S A STAGE: THE VOLKSBÜHNE THEATRE IN SCHEUNENVIERTEL

Last week in Berlin: 30 December, 1914

The Volksbühne Theatre in early 1915, in the midst of the quickly unravelling First World War. It was built on a piece of land bought cheaply from the city of Berlin - Bülowplatz (first known as Babelsberger Platz) was built in the heart of the demolished Scheunenviertel (Hay-Barn District), an underprivileged and notorious neighbourhood occupied by many Eastern European Jews, Berlin’s proletariat from other demolished areas and small criminals. Image in public domain, from the collection of the Volksbühne Theatre.

You cannot pass it by and overlook it. The massive stone body of Berlin’s Volksbühne (“People’s Theatre”) casts an equally huge shadow over Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and Linienstraße - both literally and metaphorically speaking.

The theatre building’s inauguration on December 30, 1914 might have been marred by annoying teething problems (the inauguration had to be postponed - twice - and after the rotating stage refused to rotate, that night’s programme had to be changed, too) but the birth as such was a social, cultural and political event of the decade.

The Volksbühne theatre would become the only large stage in Germany’s capital financed almost entirely through donations and membership fees - with the Arbeitergroschen or “workers’ pennies”. These were paid by members of the Freie Volksbühne Verein (Free People’s Theatre Association) established in 1890 to enable all social classes, and especially the working ones, to enjoy high culture.

The Volksbühne under construction in 1910 - in the background today’s Linienstraße and Torstraße near Rosenthaler Platz. Image in public domain.

Unlike today, where the theatre auditorium is traditionally filled with a healthy mix of various social groups (high curt judges sitting next to printers, nurses and supermarket cashiers), the late-nineteenth-century house of Thalia and Melpomene had two powerful gatekeepers: Money and Influence. Theatre going was something done for leisure and education, and remained firmly in the hand of aptly named leisure classes.

There was also the third gatekeeper preventing the less affluent from partaking in the theatre wonderland: Time. Working from the early hours of Monday until late hours of Saturday was hardly conducive to dates with Shakespeare or Schiller.

Interior of the Concordia-Theater in Friedrichstraße 218, now Berlin-Kreuzberg - the theatre would later be renamed the Apollo-Theater.

That is why the grounding principles of the Freie Volksbühne (which at an early point split into two factions whose leaders re-united again to realise the Volksbühne theatre project)- next to small membership fees and guaranteeing access to the theatres, included an important scheduling point: all plays would be presented on Sunday afternoon. To make sure that all members of the association could make it.

There was more. To make sure that the process of sitting the audience - people whose regular membership fees sustained the house - was as fair and as transparent as possible, the seating order was regulated in a simple and chance-based way: by having all theatre-ticketholders draw lottery tickets from an urn placed at the entrance.

There was only one exception - regarding the first row. However, despite what our instinct might be suggesting (in an absolutely understandable manner, seeing these places occupied by the VIPs), it was not reserved for the creme-de-la-creme. The first row of seats at the Volksbühne waited for all guests with visual impairments or hard of hearing.

The archive of the Freie Volksbühne association still holds a note provided by one of the guests to make sure she received a front-row location. A physician’s note confirming that Frau Frieda Schultze, his patient, must by all means get the first-row seat. Whether the note was written in good faith and whether Frau Schultze enjoyed the front-row view was, sadly, not recorded.

The Volksbühne in 1915 with the inscription over the main entrance. The entrance and the inscription would be heavily damaged during the Second World War (air-raids of 1943-1944 left it partly ruined) - during the renovation the relief would not be re-created and would be replaced by the name “Volksbühne”.

And here’s a small piece of Berlin trivia for your next pub quiz: two years before the Reichstag building got its inscription “Dem Deutschen Volke” (For the German People), the Volksbühne - designed for the Verein by the brilliant theatre-architect, Oskar Kaufmann - featured an equally apt inscription “Die Kunst Dem Volke” - Art for the People.

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