80 Years of Peace: When Berlin Stages Still Matter

"Berlin is reviving!" This was the headline of the Berliner Zeitung on May 21, 1945. It was the first edition of the Berliner Zeitung to be published between the destruction and the awakening in East Berlin. Now the Berliner Zeitung is celebrating its 80th anniversary. To mark the occasion, a special edition of the Berliner Zeitung is being published dedicated to the topic of awakening. This retrospective on Berlin's theater history is part of it.

The 72-page special edition of the Berliner Zeitung will be available at kiosks on May 24 and 25, 2025—or all texts can be found online here . You can subscribe to the Berliner Zeitung here .

On March 6, 1952, something terrible happened. The Berliner Ensemble hadn't yet moved to Schiffbauerdamm, but was performing at the Deutsches Theater. The production was "Mother Courage," with BE director Helene Weigel in the title role. Courage had just been brought the body of her youngest son, Schweizerkas, who had been summarily executed. The plot demands that Courage pretend she doesn't know the dead man—at the same time, her heart breaks. The emotional tension is unbearable and, in fact, impossible to act. Fortunately for everyone involved, the theater curtain is there to break up the situation. But where is the damned rag?

In a letter to the DT management, Helene Weigel sternly lists a few mishaps, including the one mentioned at the beginning: "After the third scene, there was no curtain. The curtain puller was asleep." The name of the unfortunate person has not been recorded; he probably never slept a wink in his life. Nowadays, everything is automated and computer-controlled.

The favorite example of the symbolic decline of the theater as an institution, which is sometimes confused with the downsizing of staff, is the heating system at the Volksbühne : There was a central furnace in the basement, fed with coal by seven stokers working in shifts. People must have slept well there, too. Today, there's a thermostat. What used to be made by theater tailors, shoemakers, metalworkers, carpenters, or painters is now mostly—and quite reasonably—procured at Humana or a hardware store.

Companies have become more efficient, and the number of productions rejected by smaller ensembles has increased significantly. As a result, they are disappearing into obscurity more quickly. Stage sets whose paint isn't yet completely dry are already being shredded. According to current sustainability standards, the paint must have been environmentally friendly.

The Night Cyclist of the Deutsches Theater

But what about artistic sustainability, which grows with the length of a production, and thus its relevance? As recently as the 1980s, a production was overseen by its dramaturge. The so-called evening director still monitors the quality of each individual performance, but back then, individual critiques were given to the actors, first verbally and then in writing. Ilse Geifert, Alexander Lang 's dramaturge, is said to have cycled through the city at night to deliver the written criticisms to the actors' mailboxes. Listening to the older generation, it's clear that quality standards and expectations were higher. A lot of effort was put into maintaining the ensemble and repertoire.

Today, the concept of an ensemble ends with the artistic staff, who are bound to the theater through NV-Bühne contracts and can be dismissed at any time for irrefutable "artistic reasons." This keeps the ensemble fresh, especially since newcomers are cheaper to hire. In GDR theaters, everyone was part of the ensemble. Even lighting technicians, stage technicians, stokers, and curtain pullers were expected to identify with their theaters and their cause, when they weren't sleeping.

Furthermore, deep aesthetic divides ran through Berlin, in this case not necessarily along the death strip , but between Brecht's theater, which was suspected of formalism, with its dialectical approach and famous alienation effect, on the one hand, and the Stanislavski tradition, incorporated into the doctrine of Socialist Realism, on the other. This was the subject of long, profound and sometimes fundamentalist debates in the Neues Deutschland and the Berliner Zeitung, with sometimes very unpleasant consequences for one or two artistic hopefuls who had lost their way in their ideology.

Hope for the future of the theater

Something was at stake. And not only the Stasi , but also the audience, listened and watched all the more closely because the theater was freer than the press and took on tasks that, in better times, art wasn't really responsible for. This made the stage a relevant, subversive social communication channel, disguised as metaphors, exerting social criticism that, had it been clearly expressed, would have been ignored. Who knows whether Yevgeny Schwarz's "The Dragon" would have been performed over 600 times if it hadn't alluded to Stalin and Ulbricht .

Those must have been a time when the city's dignitaries, and the city itself, cared about what was shown on stage. Rarely does something like this flash up in today's theater routine: the absoluteness of a production, the realization of a utopia, the birth of an idea for reality. Outside of its bubble, the theater makes a name for itself less with its art than with debates about racism, sexism, and power, and now especially with the Senate's existentially threatening austerity measures. Although even in these, given the danger, interest is rather weak. One must be cautious with theater history because of its susceptibility to legend. But the city's stages were once more important to us. Perhaps we are doing too well. For now. Then one could look to the theater's future with hope.