Municipal Theatre

The second Bremen City Theatre stood on the Bischofsnadel Bastion beside the old town wall, a three-storey classical building finished in 1843. It replaced an earlier theatre that had struggled with money and lacked a permanent company. A group of 153 citizens, including senators and merchants, raised 15,300 Reichsthalers to pay for the new playhouse. The front on the Wall showed a pediment above three wide doors reached by a flight of seven steps. Side wings held a balcony carried on six iron columns, and the auditorium seated about 1,400 people. Iron grilles and balcony railings were cast by Andreas Friedrich Uhthoff of Vegesack. The theatre opened with Johann Ludwig Deinhardstein’s play Hans Sachs on 16 October 1843 under its first intendant, Karl August Ritter. Performances ranged from Shakespeare to Wagner, whose Tannhäuser was first heard in Bremen in 1853. After Heinrich Seemann’s death in 1855 the city bought the house for 47,600 Talers and ran it as the municipal playhouse. Local artists Heinrich Bulthaupt and Arthur Fitger shaped its repertory and even designed scenery and the main curtain. From 1885 naturalist dramas by Gerhart Hauptmann and Henrik Ibsen joined verismo operas by Mascagni and Puccini. Today the site forms part of the landscaped Theatre Garden, laid out in terraces after the war. A bronze figure by Gerhard Marcks, Ägina, stands among the lawns and paths. Below ground, the old air-raid shelter once housed the short-lived Kunst-Krypta gallery of ceramic works. The garden remains a quiet corner of the Wall promenade, where the theatre’s memory lingers in stone and greenery.